


Medical

by Cosmic_Biscuit



Series: Bandage-Bound [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Awkward Crush, Fluff and Angst, Illnesses, M/M, Nightmares, Scars, Spies & Secret Agents, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-11
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2018-08-16 18:53:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 30
Words: 34,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8113615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cosmic_Biscuit/pseuds/Cosmic_Biscuit
Summary: They bond over shared history. Old soldiers share scars, after all. Then other feelings begin complicating matters.  (chapters written on request at tumblr and altered according to place in timeline; shares worldbuilding with Mission Logs, but does not take place in the same timeline.)





	1. Reassess

The melee was not going as expected. But that wasn’t what was causing the pounding in his chest. No, that had been the incident approximately twenty-three seconds after the ambush.

It had been over in a heart beat.

He had only barely heard Keith’s warning - he wouldn’t have been able to turn around fast enough.

But when he _did_ turn it was as though things were moving in slow motion.

He saw the bolt from the energy rifle disperse against Coran’s particle shield -when had he gotten that? Where had he even _come_ from?- he saw Coran’s pistol come up and fire -when had he gotten _that?_ \- and he saw the mercenary fall from the cliffside, all in one fluid motion.

“Are you alright? Did anything hit you?”

“W-what?” Shiro had asked before snapping out of the stunned daze. “N-no! No, I’m fine!”

“Then let’s go, before reinforcements show up!”

Still half-numb, he had run after the Altean, his spinning mind suddenly supplying another memory instead of what he had just seen.

A cleaning towel.

A splatter of food.

A serving ladle.

Halfway down the cave corridor, Shiro’s eyes went wide as he stared at the back of the man he was following.

_Oh sweet God. He could’ve killed us all if we’d actually been a threat._

—

He was staring.

He was very aware he was staring.

He couldn’t _stop_ staring. “Coran?”

The Altean was on his knees and hunched over, clutching his right shoulder in pain. And he was a _mess_. Gashes and burn streaks littered his skin, and most horrifyingly prominent were what looked like claw marks that ran straight over his right eye and through his facial marking.

But…

They were _old_. Healed. _Scarred_. All except for the fresh blaster wounds to his shoulder and side that had… triggered the…

… _Shapeshifting_ …

Finally shaking himself out of his shock, Shiro threw up his shield and ducked his way through the gunfire to get to the older man. The glance Coran shot him showed that he was very aware he’d lost control of his transformation, but Shiro bit his lip and shook his head in a silent signal of ‘Later’. “We gotta get outta here,” was all he said.

“Agreed,” Coran rasped, allowing him to help him up.

They’d have a lot to talk about at the castle.

But they had to _get_ to the castle first.

—

Two battles.

Two shocks.

Two pieces of information that made entirely too much _sense_ once he actually had time to slot them together with the other small observations he’d begun making since getting them.

The things Coran took the most care to look after. The way he rationed supplies. Lance had offhandedly mentioned Coran telling him about boot camp, but that didn’t add up to what Shiro was seeing.

 _Had_ seen.

Eventually, he decided it was best to just suck it up and approach the subject directly. “Were you ever a palace guard?” he asked one night as they were putting away the Paladins’ training gear.

Surprisingly, Coran merely blinked in surprise before looking rather pleased. “Why, yes, of sorts. I was actually bodyguard for their majesties for a time. How did you guess?”

Shiro awkwardly scratched the back of his neck. “Uh… just… noticed… some things is all. It’s not really a big deal. I was just curious why you don’t…” Oh. Oh, now this was awkward. Why was it his business to be prying into this? It hadn’t been his business to see the other man’s scars in the first place, since he clearly wanted to keep them hidden.

He felt a strange little pain in his chest at the thought and involuntarily glanced at his false arm.

God, what was he doing?

“Shiro?”

He raised his head, and sucked in a breath of shock. Coran had dropped the transformation illusion, and crouching next to him on the practice floor was the scarred up man he’d seen on a desolate rock three weeks ago.

Shiro swallowed, overcome with a strange sense of relief that the older man had understood the source of his internal storm. “Why?” he asked hesitantly, hoping he’d understand that too.

“Hm, protocol, to start with,” Coran said, scratching under his chin. “Not their majesties’, of course. They’d have let me look however I pleased. Always let me remove the illusion in private, in fact. But the military brass expected the royal bodyguard to project some sort of air of invincibility, and you can’t exactly do that when you look like you’ve been chewed on.”

“But none of them are here now,” Shiro pointed out, before realizing how tactless it might have been to do so. His face burned in embarrassment, but, thankfully, Coran didn’t seem to notice the faux pas.

“Yes, well. I’m afraid Allura never got the chance to get used to this me before things went rather bell-shaped. It was… never the right time, I suppose,” he said, fiddling with his gloves. “I would rather she not be introduced to it at this point. Probably would be a bit of a shock.”

Shiro hesitated, then looked at his arm again, the scarring above it, and back at Coran. “Would it… be too much to ask if I could see it more often? Maybe during repairs?”

Coran tilted his head slightly in thought, then a faint smile crossed his mouth and he clapped Shiro on the back as he stood, remasking his scarring in the process. “I think we can make an arrangement.”


	2. Recovery

So it was just the scars at first. Scars he'd learned were always kept transformation masked around the others, even Allura. _Especially_ Allura. Never around him, though, once the secret had been shot both metaphorically and physically. The war-torn recognized each other, after all. He’d acknowledged in kind, grateful for the unspoken camaraderie, and didn’t flinch away when Coran had stepped in to permanently act as his medic, treating raw flesh around the mechanical connections in his arm. 

He’d noticed the hands as well. Quick and careful, long fingers calloused by weapon usage and electric burns from hundreds of years of battle and mechanic work. The Galra druids sure as hell hadn’t been so gentle, but neither had Garrison medics, each movement precise as Coran picked through damaged wires and soldered together frayed connections.

But it was nothing, really. _Really._ Just appreciation for a job well done, that was _all._ And, frankly, Coran’s bedside manner was terrible, leaving Shiro rolling his eyes at his jokes as he tested his fingers and grip before pulling his shirt back on and muttering his thanks as he slid off the examination table. 

He certainly didn’t turn red at the reassuring clap on the back before the older man turned to begin putting away the repair tools. 

No, he definitely didn’t notice _that_.

-

“Absolutely not, your highness. You are just as much in need of a day’s break as everyone else, so I insist.”

“But-”

It was probably lucky that the rest of the crew had already disembarked, otherwise Shiro was fairly sure Allura would have killed the lot of them if they saw Coran shoving her towards the castle gate like a mother sending a stubborn child off to their first day of primary. For his own part, he wisely kept his mouth shut and avoided making any comments as the princess finally gave in and swiped the bag Coran held out of his hand.

“Fine, you old nurse. But if I have to go, why aren’t you coming?”

“Someone has to fix the damage last night’s ‘experiments’ left in the kitchen waste vaporizer chutes. Besides, I’m a bit too old to fully enjoy the Amburnal Solar Solstice Festival anymore.” Coran dropped a kiss on the princess’ forehead, making her grin, and Shiro politely looked away to let them have the moment. “Go have some fun, sweetbug.”

Allura passed him and Shiro started to turn to follow, but when he briefly looked back… the Altean was looking awfully pale. Shiro kept his expression calm, but his concern grew as Coran became visibly unsteady as he headed back into the castle. Checking to make sure Allura had already gone to join the others, he quietly slipped back through the massive gates.

His worry had been well-founded. Coran was leaning heavily on the wall, tremors in his hands evident. “Coran.”

The other man’s head snapped up and he nearly lost what little balance he had. Shiro lunged forward and caught him before he could slide down the wall, and Coran blinked at him, eyes not quite focusing right. “Oh, it’s you.”

“Yeah. Just me,” he clarified when Coran tried to look behind them. “Geez, why didn’t you tell anyone you were this sick?”

“Not a worry. It’ll pass in a bit.”

“I thought we were going to be honest with each other on medical issues,” Shiro said, and a little bit more hurt than he would have liked must have leaked into his voice, because Coran made a faint little wheeze and tried to pat him on the back with a trembling hand.

Tried.

“I mean it. A little bit of the castle’s usual recycled air and I’ll be fine.”

He was more than a bit dubious about that, but he hooked an arm around the other man’s waist to help him to the lifts.

-

“Not that one.”

Shiro paused at the spout for the nunveille, looking back to where he’d left Coran hunched over a table.

“Third closet from the door, fourth blue cana on the sixth shelf.”

He found the directed item, cautiously taking a sniff after he cracked the seal. It smelled a bit like the prickly pears that grew near the Garrison. Or had when he’d been there. “This isn’t liquor, is it?”

“Glories, no.”

Taking a seat, he poured the shimmering deep purple liquid in a glass and let Coran get a few shaky sips down. “What is it?”

Coran sighed, looking at it in distaste. “A tonic Dra- the previous Blue Paladin used to make for atmosphere sickness that occurs on certain planets. An unfortunately lifelong side effect for the rare few that survive Lorken Weed poisoning.”

He didn’t know why he was surprised, given some of the stories Coran had already been willing to share, but he still felt something in his gut twist. “You’ve been poisoned before?”

“Galactic politics and such,” Coran said, then downed some more of the fluid. “Some renegade group doesn’t like their government opening off-planet trade, but they don’t dare strike at their own rulers, so they try to kill the other side, so on and so forth. I imagine much the same sort of thing happened on your world.”

“Yeah…” but not to anyone he… “Does Allura know?”

“About the original incident, yes. I would, however, appreciate if you kept the ongoing symptoms as one of our topics of discussion only.”

“Will do.”

By the time Coran finished off the tonic, his hands were steady and his eyes were clear. “I do believe that’s it, then.”

“Do you need me to do anything else?” Shiro asked as he started to get up.

“No, I should be fine. Thank you kindly, Shiro.” The Altean’s smile made his face a bit warm. “Go catch up with the rest. Get in a bit of the festival before the Ambur start closing down their stalls for the night.”

“Alright then. See you when we get back.”

It still bothered him a bit, though as he took the lift back down to the gate hall. That Coran had brought them here to enjoy a day off, knowing he couldn’t join them because of his condition.

Maybe he’d ask Allura what kind of festival food Coran liked.


	3. Recast

The first time they had reason to be suspicious was when a set of new flare-point phase cables arrived at the castle only a week after Pidge had complained about needing them for repairs to Green’s secondary weapon, despite the castle being in no apparent place to receive _mail,_ of all things.

The second had been when they were being pursued through an open-air market by Galra sentries, and willing hands had passed them along from street to passageway to street in secret to keep them away from being shot. “Debts repaid,” was all the cloaked figures had said, refusing to give their identities.

The third and last straw for Shiro was when coordinates that Coran had given him, coordinates that _should_ have led into a sand pit in the middle of nowhere, opened into an underground temple where the inhabitants had been all too happy to give him dozens of boxes of ammunition for the weapons their new-found allies on Umorna carried. 

Allies Coran had _also_ pointed them to.

“So… Royal Advisor, huh?” He asked, folding his arms as he leaned against the doorway of the Lions' hanger, watching Coran putter with some bits and pieces of mechanical equipment. “Bet that covered a pretty wide range of duties back in the old days.”

“Oh, my, yes,” Coran said without looking up, apparently fascinated by some sort of autofire device for a security droid. “Keeping the castle staff running smoothly, coordinating diplomatic visits, assisting with the Paladins’ training upkeep-”

“Acting as Spymaster?”

Coran froze, then very slowly raised the focus lens he’d been peering through. “Now, what would give you that impression?”

Shiro sighed, then approached and crouched beside the older man. “Look… maybe I’m going about this wrong. All this stuff… it’s been a huge help to us, I’m not saying it hasn’t, I just… I just… thought we were… trusting each other.”

Coran took a deep breath, then let it out, then sat back on his heels. “Shiro, I’m going to tell you the same thing I told Alfor back then. There are some things that, in order to keep you out of danger, you can’t know. Because if you _did_ , someone would want to kill you to get that information. You just have to trust _me_ to know those things, and that I’m using them to keep us going and keep you all safe.”

He bit his lip, considering that. “I think I understand. But at the same time, we’re pretty much always going to have the Galra breathing down our necks. And trying to take our heads _off_ them,” he added, earning a small snort. “So… maybe you could share just a _little_ more? Just to take some of the weight off?”

Coran looked down at the tools in his hands, deep in thought. “We’ll see. I can’t promise any more than that,” he finally said after a long silence.

Shiro sat down fully on the floor next to him, leaning back against a console as the uncomfortable feeling in the room dissipated. “I’ll take it.”

—

_He’d been Royal Advisor for all of six cycles, not time enough for all of the governors to be informed that the position had even been created, when there was a knock at the door of the office he was moving into, next to the one he’d once shared with Illyere. “Come in.”_

_He was surprised to see a familiar face enter. “Sarnal, old man. I was told you’d retired.”_

_The elderly Altean grinned, red eyes and markings all flashing with mirth. “Not quite yet, brat. Retirement had to be put off until I could train my replacement. Lothal never chose one.”_

_Coran swallowed, a prickling feeling of foreboding creeping up his spine. “Replacement for…what? The armory?”_

_The grin grew wider. “Walk with me, brat.”_

_—_

_Coran’s head was humming, and he clutched the balcony to keep himself upright. **Sarnal?** The Spymaster for Alfor’s father and grandfather? He thought of all the times the old man had helped him and his cousins during their games of hide and seek in the castle, how he’d always seemed to know just how to keep out of the way of the royals before they could get in trouble._

_It made… a dizzying amount of sense, when he thought about it. A spy **would** have to know every inch of the castle, inside and out._

_And now he was going to be expected to do the same… It just seemed like so much, on top of the other responsibilities he was going to be carrying…_

_But…_

_He remembered Illyere’s bright smile as she’d left for the last time. Allura’s tears as she’d huddled in Prichel’s arms and clutched his hand at the funeral. The sheer weight of the exhausted slump in Alfor’s shoulders as he’d stood with the priestesses…_

_“Alright, old man. Teach me.”_


	4. Reconfigure

He opened his eyes to purple lighting overhead and oppressive shadows closing in. Attempts to inhale were met with cold metal bands tightening over his chest, clamping him down to an even icier metal table.

No.

_No._

He knew this place.

The sound of someone approaching; a low, familiar chuckle, sent terror washing through him, and he twisted under the bonds, trying desperately in vain to wrench himself free.

“Stupid boy. You’ll only make it hurt more.”

Pain exploded like a lightning strike through the mechanical arm into the flesh stump of his own, and he _writhed_ , arching up to scream-

-only when he jerked up, the bindings were gone, replaced by blankets.

Blankets… darkness… bed… Cabin.

His cabin in the castle.

Shiro sank back down, head thumping into the pillow as he tried to slow his breathing back down from panicked gasps. Nightmare… only a nightmare. 

Only his third one in a week. 

He scrubbed his face with his flesh hand. He was going to have to do _something_ about this. The others were going to eventually notice his sleeping was shot. For now, though, he just needed to get out. Get air. Be anywhere but his room.

—

His wandering ended up taking him down to the training room he and the others had been using. Maybe if he practiced more with the arm, he’d feel less panicked about the possibility of it being reprogrammed again. It was as good idea as any, he figured. But he stopped when he heard the sound of clanging metal behind the door. 

Someone else was in there? At this hour?

Not wanting to interrupt, but curious to see who it was, he changed his course and took the secondary lift up to the observation deck. 

“Holy hell.”

He’d guessed maybe Keith or Allura, at long shot Hunk or Lance. Pidge wasn’t likely since there’d still been systems diagnostics running when he’d gone to bed. But he never would have expected to see _Coran_ down there on the floor with the gladiator robot, two wide-bladed short swords in hand and moving with the speed and dexterity of an expert duelist.

His own practice forgotten, he pulled over a chair and sat down to watch, entranced, as robot and Altean battled back and forth, until the gladiator finally caught an opening and tripped its opponent up, leveling a sword blade at the redhead’s throat. 

Panting, Coran backed up and bowed. ”I yield.” The gladiator drew its sword back and snapped it up in a salute before vanishing into the floor.

As Coran went to go put away his practice swords, Shiro got up and took the lift back down to enter the training hall. “That was amazing.”

The older man jumped and turned, surprised. “Oh! Hah, it’s you. Wasn’t expecting anyone to be about at this time. Well, except Pidge. I’ll have to go drag that one out of the computer systems soon before I end up having to clean stimulant juice out of the wires again.”

“I was having some trouble sleeping so I came down to train. Why didn’t you tell anyone you can fight like that?”

“…Eh.” Coran looked over the dulled training sword, running a gloved thumb along the edge. “I’m afraid ten thousand years of cryo took a toll that was a bit more than just a joke. Allura readjusted quickly because of her connection to the universe’s quintessence, but it’s going to take some more practice for me. In the old days, I could have _won_ a longer bout than that, and with a lot less exhaustion afterwards.”

“Wow. Bet it would be good for guarding the castle while we’re gone, though.”

“That’s the plan! But enough of that,” Coran said, brightening up and tucking the sword into a case with its twin. “What’s this sleeping problem you mentioned? Do I need to make any climate adjustments?”

“No… No, my room is perfectly fine, thank you, I just…” He swallowed, then decided to bite the bullet. They’d been honest with each other about everything else. “I’ve been having nightmares about the arm. I’m hoping that it’s just nothing, but… the Galra built it, and they used it to leash me before. What if they could do it again?”

“Hm. That is a rather scary thought. May I?” Shiro offered his arm, and Coran took it, gently popping the secret catch in the upper casing to take a look inside. After a moment’s inspection, though, he smiled and closed it. “I believe I’ve got an idea. Follow me.”

—

He’d never been in this hallway of the castle. He couldn't remember even seeing it on the maps he'd studied, now that he thought about it. It was just as clean and well-kept as the rest, but it felt… quieter, somehow. Almost sad. “Where are we?”

“These were the special guest quarters where the old Paladins stayed when they were on-world.”

“They weren’t Alteans?” Somehow it had never occurred to him that the old Paladins could have been a mixed bunch. Zarkon had claimed to be a Paladin, hadn’t he? Though they were having a very hard time believing that could have ever been possible-

“Oh my, no. His majesty was the only Altean the Lions chose. All the rest… all the rest came from quite an eclectic assortment. Here we are.” Coran tapped the pad for a set of doors and they swooshed open.

The lighting was different from any of the rooms Shiro had seen before. Floating cube-shaped lamps of soft pink were mixed with overhead orbs of deep orange, creating spots of colored light of different tints all around. The glowing screens of the datapads and computer banks matched the cubes, but the assorted prototypes and pieces of tech and tools were a dual mix of clearly differing types. Or fusions of the two.

“Man, what Pidge wouldn’t give to see this place.”

“Well… I may hold back on that for a bit. A lot of this is still too sentimental to be torn into just yet. But maybe eventually.” 

Coran guided him in, picking around bits and pieces, then picked up a datapad to begin sorting through an inventory of sorts. Shiro began looking around a little, then froze when he saw a hulking figure looming by one of the computer banks. “Ah- Coran…”

“Hm? Oh. That’s just Smooshy. He won’t wake up without his mistress to give the command code.”

“Oh.” A robot that would sleep forever because its owner was ten thousand years dead… that was rather depressing. He wondered if Pidge would be able to fix that. “Which Paladins was all this for?”

“Mirje and Joitree, our Green and Red. Joitree started it first, of course. Yulnadae couldn’t help but create home labs for themselves, and since we were taking so much time away from her central lab, giving her space to work only seemed fair. After they became friends and collaborators, Mirje started using this as her base as well."

He tried to keep his hands to himself, he really did, but curiosity won out, and he began carefully picking through a few pieces, careful to only touch what looked like it wouldn’t activate. There was so _much._ Weaponry, machinery, what could possibly be prosthetics, God only knew what… He picked up a rudimentary skeletal arm of a robot that would never be finished and gently tested its finger movements. 

Huh. Kinda reminded him of…

“Did the Galra ever use any of this?”

Coran looked up from his searching. “Not anything in this room specifically, which is why we’re here. But if you’re asking if they stole from the Yulnadae and the Orichians, then the answer is yes. The Empire was quite shameless about incorporating the genius of the races it slaughtered. _However,_ we will be working with pure, untouched technology, and, if you’ll pardon my personal bias, we’ll be working with the best.”

Shiro couldn’t help but grin at Coran’s infectious confidence.

—

He’d always hated the sound of heart monitors. Even before the Galra, before the Garrison, the constant beeping had always dredged something up deep inside him, something cold and nervous that he couldn’t explain. 

“Alright, let me know when the settings are optimal.”

The fact that heart monitors existed that could be customized to the listener’s needs - that Coran would be totally fine with spending nearly half an hour fine tuning it every time he needed surgery - had never occurred to him. He’d embarrassed himself by crying the first time they’d done this. But now it was almost comfortingly routine. And once the soft hum with its pulses of volume to indicate his heartbeat was in place, he settled back onto the chair and took a deep breath. “Ready.”

The two selected prosthetics lay on a table by Coran’s tools. One of Joitree’s finished prototypes, and one of Mirje’s. They were so very different in design - Joitree’s was sleek and aesthetically made, slim pink lines of light in geometric patterns indicating the joints and embellishments, while Mirje’s was hard industrial, all spikes and armor and fire-forged steel - but both more beautiful in their own way than the stark chunks of metal that had been grafted onto him. 

“I’m going to disconnect your nervous function for a bit, just so you won’t be feeling the pain while I do the heavy reconfiguring to the mechanics. Have you given any consideration to the casings?”

“I’d thought about leaving them the same,” Shiro said, tentatively running flesh fingers over the metal hand. “Just so the Galra won’t suspect anything is amiss. But I think that would kind of be a waste of such nice work. And… when I finally get the chance to punch Zarkon in the face, I want him to know whose tech I’m decking him with.” He turned a little pink. “I know it probably sounds stupid, but it feels like letting them get a little revenge, you know?”

Coran tilted his head, giving him a sad little smile and squeezing his shoulder. “Not stupid at all, lad. I think those two especially would have appreciated the gesture," he said before turning all business again. "I’m going to use the bone structure from Mirje’s arm. It’ll be a little bit heavier, but hardier. You won’t need me to do so many repair solders after battles.” 

"Sounds good." Shiro swallowed past the sudden lump in his throat and laid back again, staring at the ceiling as he heard Coran pop the casings open. On one hand, he sort of wanted to watch. On the other, this wasn’t just maintenance or repair. Having a complete overhaul might have been a bit more than his stomach could stand.

Ultimately, though, curiosity won, and he turned his head to find Coran delicately replacing the electric wiring with the power nodules and couplings from Joitree’s prototype. “What will that do?”

“Based on the design specs I studied, this should up your output by a good forty-two per cent and reduce the drain by seventy-three. The original design to the weaponry was rather inefficient, considering what it was meant for. You shouldn’t have near as much of a headache or arm strain after a fight after this.”

“Well, I wasn’t supposed to be fighting on my own instincts, either,” Shiro pointed out. “So better efficiency will be doing me good on that regard, too.”

“Hmm, true."

After several minutes of just the humming of the monitors and the little bips and zots and clicks of Coran working, Shiro began to feel a bit lulled and sleepy watching. “What were they like?”

“Hm?”

“The two who made these.”

“Oh.” Coran didn’t look up from his work. “Brilliant in their own ways. Both stubborn as pirkapaks. They actually hated each other’s guts when the Paladins first met; Yulnadae and Orichians had very different ideas when it came to scientific method. It was actually Zarkon who made them friends, if you can believe that.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it,” Shiro said dryly. Trying to picture _Zarkon_ telling _anyone_ to get along just sort of made his brain come up with error messages.

Coran snorted in amusement. “I imagine it seems like a bit of a stretch. Even having _been_ there for it, I have trouble remembering it that way now. But anyway, they both loved terrible food and worse alcohol, and they balanced each other well in battle. They were... sisters by the end.”

Shiro thought back to the lab. The way the lighting had been arranged. The way the prototypes and tools had been arranged. The fusion projects. It wasn’t just a place of roommates. Lab partners. It was clearly a place that the pair had both considered  _home._ He remembered what Coran had said when they’d begun their training about how the Paladins had become linked during all their missions. What would it be like for him and all the others to become so close that even their workspaces would be like that?

What would it be like if one of them died after that?

He decided he didn’t want to ask.

Biting his lip, Shiro just stayed quiet and watched until it was time to begin turning his nervous systems back on. Even those had been reconstructed, rewired with new filaments from Mirje’s work and controls he could command to dial down sensation responses himself from Joitree’s. 

“Alright, lad, here we go. Let me know if anything feels amiss.”

Little by little, starting with a bit of a burn in the stump and working down to a tingling in the tip of his fingers, everything came back online. “Oh… Oh, wow. That… It already _feels_ better.”

“Even with the added weight?”

“Yeah, it just- It just feels like it’s _me_ instead of a thing connected to me.” He wiggled his fingers, then fluttered them forward and back. Clenched a fist, then opened it.

“Before you start trying out the weapon capability, let’s work on the casing. Got to make sure everything lines up correctly and won’t overheat.”

“Sure… sure, okay.” 

His eyes were wet. Blinking quickly to keep Coran from seeing, he laid his arm back across the table and watched as the other man picked up a tiny rotary saw tool to begin slicing the casings of the two prototypes into smaller slivers so they could be pieced together more easily. 

He ended up choosing most of Joitree’s geometric casing. As nice as it would have been to have the extra armor protection, Mirje’s just added too much weight to an already overbalanced body. He did pick one thing, though, and grinned when he clenched a fist and the gauntlet spikes at the knuckles formed impressive little claws.

“Fire it up and let’s see how it does.”

Shiro activated the combat power through the arm, and grinned even wider when it glowed the deep, dark pink of Joitree’s work instead of the Galra purple and the gauntlet spikes activated along with the rest of the glove.

Ten thousand year old tech sang through him, sang _to_ him, as if the two old Paladin scientists themselves had reached out from the past and clapped him on the back. 

‘ _This is yours now. Go get him.’_


	5. Reminisce

“Can…” Shiro bit his lip, then swallowed. “Is it okay if I see?” 

It had nearly put him on the floor when Coran told him he had some of Mirje’s work on him, too. _Coran_. Who moved as balanced and even as if he’d been calibrated. And yet as he watched, the older man took a seat and calmly removed his boot, rolling up his uniform leg just above the knee to show…

-seemingly nothing unusual? But before Shiro could ask, Coran tapped _something_ unseen, and the apparent _normal-ness_ of his limb _shimmered_ for a moment before seams and panels and tiny rivets became visible.

Shiro gaped. “How? _When_?”

“If you mean when I lost the limb, that was before the original Voltron team was even formed,” Coran said, sitting up and unmasking the rest of his scars. “Back when I was still the royal bodyguard, there was a poison bomb attempt on the king’s life during one of our offworld visits. It was a fairly weak attempt as they go, really. But I took some shrapnel in the leg and got contaminated. The infirmary staff amputated the limb when we got back to Altea." He raked his fingers through his hair in a reflexive gesture. "The queen was furious.”

Shiro rested his chin in his hands, frowning a little. "Why would the queen be mad at _you?_ Because you had to go off duty?”

Coran snorted and shook his head. “Oh, no, no, no, Illyere wasn’t mad at _me._ It was the medics who ordered the amputation that she nearly took apart. See, her majesty wasn’t a full-blooded Altean, and that had an interesting effect. Rather than being able to shapeshift like the rest of us, she had a healing talent like her offworlder relatives. Saved my neck several times, in fact,” he said, pointing to the claw-mark scars over his eye. “But Altea in those times… wasn’t the best place to be of mixed blood. Even as a queen.”

It took him a few seconds to put the pieces together, then his eyes widened. “They wouldn’t let her in to see you, when she could have fixed you before the leg got bad enough to need amputation.”

“Got it in one.” Coran folded his hands over his stomach and sighed. “I don’t recall a lot of what happened after the surgery, because I was in cryo for recovery. Their majesties never wanted to talk about it. I suspect Alfor fired the lot, or transferred them to positions away from the castle. _No,_ they wouldn’t have been arrested for anything,” he added pointedly when Shiro sat up and opened his mouth.

Shiro flushed. “I was actually going to ask what the replacement originally was, since you didn’t know Mirje then. But… that _is_ a good point. I’m kinda glad to know that they didn’t do anything seriously bad to the medics… even if would've had it coming.”

“Ah. Sorry, then.” Coran scratched the back of his neck. “Altean prosthetics are designed via nanotech to replicate the original limb as closely as possible. They grow in laboratory conditions, then are grafted using shapeshifting back to the stub of the amputated limb.”

“That sounds _amazing_. No offense, but why would you go from _that_ to hardware?”

"Hm... Well... The grafting never really… _took_ for me, I suppose. Call it allergy, call it psychology, but I hated the damn thing every day I had it. Constant itching, dreams of it on fire, stiffness in the joints; it was an absolute pest. I just never wanted to broach the subject around their majesties because I knew Illyere already felt guilty about the fact that I had it. And after she… _passed,_ there was just so much to do that eventually I was too busy to notice it anymore.”

“Until you met Mirje?”

“Until I met Mirje. She actually convinced Joitree to give prosthetics sciences a try, believe it or not. And then they started collaborating and revolutionized the field of mechanical limbs together.” He tapped his leg again and then flexed the toes, showing off how fine the gear control was. “I was one of their first joint exhibitions.”

Shiro leaned down closer, peering at the joint connections. “What’s this little thing here?” he asked, pointing to a strangely-placed node just above the ankle that connected to the back of the calf.

“Heh.” Coran reached down and pressed it, and Shiro stared in surprise when the ankle joint popped open, revealing a miniature set of mechanic’s tools. “Backup. Never know when you’ll need repairs in a pinch.”

“ _Cool_. Can you install me a set?” 

“We might be able to make that work.”


	6. Replace

A subtle throb had formed behind his eyes during the Lions’ re-docking, and it had been steadily growing for the last three hours. After a seemingly minor thing had caused an argument to erupt during cooldown training, Shiro decided he'd had enough. Quietly escaping from the combat round while Allura separated Keith and Lance for what seemed like the thousandth time, he took the now-familiar pathways into the depths of the castle to the Old Paladins’ Hall.

He wasn’t expecting to see any lights on other than the dim green of the emergencies, but when he came across a soft glow from an open doorway, there was only one person it could be. Peering inside, he found Coran hunched over a table in what looked like a small private kitchen, a series of little bottles and pouches and small cups and bowls of powder in front of him. Curious, Shiro stepped into the room, then knocked on the doorframe to announce his presence. 

Coran started just a little, his intense concentration broken, but waved him inside without looking up. “Come on in, Shiro. Training finished already?”

“Sort of. Nobody’s in the mood. My head’s killing me.”

“Well, if this works, maybe I can fix that. Have a seat.”

Shiro obeyed, resting his chin on his hands. Coran tapped a button on the table and the lighting in the kitchen dimmed a little, and Shiro made a grateful hum of acknowledgement to the gesture. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to make something without the right things to make it.” Coran stirred a finished concoction and tested a sip, then made an impressive face. “Not yet. Perhaps if I replace the crushed limke seeds with the powdered fuillal root.” Another button push opened a waste disposal chute and he dumped the failed creation down it.

Content to just watch, Shiro stayed quiet as Coran mixed and remixed test batches, muttering to himself as he worked. He was mildly surprised to see the man, well, cooking the way he was _used_ to cooking being done. Coran seemed to have just given up lately and let Hunk take over, when the food didn’t come out of the replicators. 

Maybe he’d ask about it some other time, when the older man wasn’t so focused.

“Hmm,” Coran finally murmured, expression finally contemplative instead of outright disgusted. “Still not _quite_ right… But I suppose this is as close as I am ever going to get again. Let’s see, note to self… julpara sweet cream, powdered fuillal root, lilippa juice, crushed warak nuts, powdered pabag leaves, heated to boiling, then cooled slightly with imakk sugar.”

“Why can’t you make the original anymore?” Shiro asked as Coran made up another cup of the same substance and pushed it over to him. Steaming a little, it looked like black coffee, but smelled remarkably like milk chocolate.

And _tasted_  like it, too, he realized, eyes going wide at the first sip.

“Well, all of the original ingredients were on Altea,” Coran explained as he sipped his own. “Old recipe from my mother and aunt’s side of the family, you see. And if the planet itself is even still there these days… I’m afraid there was nothing left on it that was usable for food when we fled.”

The drink soured a little in Shiro’s stomach at that revelation. “Oh… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… I wasn’t trying to-”

Coran patted his hand lightly. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I was already facing it when I started looking for possible replacements in the Eramek market.” He finished his off and began to brew up another. “How is it?”

“It’s… _really_ good. It tastes a lot like something we have back home.”

“Fascinating! I’ll have to stock up on the ingredients next time we get the chance. It’s good that the pabag leaves were usable, both they and the ingredient they replaced are a natural painkiller. Perhaps I’ll integrate this as a post-mission ritual. If you don’t show any side effects.”

Shiro snorted at that, remembering some unfortunate reactions to the food when they'd stopped on Neremili, but couldn’t even find it in him to be worried at the prospect when the flavor settled so comfortably on his tongue. Instead he just cradled the mug a little closer as he accepted seconds and enjoyed the familiar warmth.


	7. Reaquaint

“Oh, my _my,_ aren’t _you_ a sight for sore eyes!” 

Coran stiffened at the voice that sang sweetly out of the market crowd, an expression of long-suffering resignation crossing his face. Shiro raised an eyebrow at that, but didn’t get a chance to ask before the older man turned, catching a mass of gold and white fluff that had practically flung itself at him. “Chulekkere, dear,” he said, voice even. “How have you been?”

The stranger pulled back, and Shiro finally could sort them -him? her? he stuck with them- out. Three iridescent violet eyes, a somewhat fox-like muzzle and teeth, but ears that were far too long to be vulpine. Four of them. No tail, but the braided ropes of hair the stranger wore in an intricate style seemed to act like prehensile tails of their own will… attempting to wrap around Coran.

He scowled and moved in closer to the Altean, thwarting the attempt just by vicinity. If ‘Chulekkere’ noticed he was actively getting in their way, they paid no mind. “Oh, it’s been so long, Ekri'ke. _Too_ long. All those wretched rumors of your demise the Empire kept peddling, you know I never believed a word of them, but when you never appeared again… “ They gently patted Coran’s chest with a paw in an intimately familiar gesture, resting their head on his shoulder, and Shiro was impressed when Coran didn’t so much as flinch. “Oh, I was so, _so_ upset.”

“I can well imagine,” Coran said, and though his tone was affectionate, it was clear he was trying to politely extricate himself from the embrace.

Trying.

“Oh, we must spend some time catching up, Ekri'ke. Perhaps dinner?” Chulekkere asked, baring sharp teeth in what would have been an extremely charming smile had it not been so apparent that this dance had been danced one too many times before. 

Shiro pursed his lips, then moved in. “I’m sorry, Talla,” he said, remembering the Altean neutral-address of respect Coran had taught him. “But he has already been spoken for.” 

Black furred eyebrows raised high, and Chulekkere put a paw to their mouth with an even wider smile. “ _Ooo_ oohhh? Sir Coran, you should have _told_ me,” they said, violet eyes dancing with mischief. “Ah well, ah well. I _always_ have another chance eventually. Ta, Ekri'ke!” 

Shiro blinked after them, wondering what the hell _that_ had been about, then turned to find Coran bright pink. “Coran?”

 _“Spoken for?”_  the older man squeaked.

“Well… yeah, you’re supposed to be spending the rest of the day with me and the team. Your time’s spoken for.”

“That’s not what that _means_ out here!”

Oh. 

…

_Oh._

Now _Shiro_ wanted to sink into the sand and die as he felt his face go flaming hot with embarrassment. “Well… at least it got them off your case?” he asked lamely.

Coran coughed, slowly returning back to his normal color. “True. Glad for that. Chulekkere’s a nice sort, but that’s rather like describing suffocation as the most pleasant way to die. Now then,” he added, taking on a rather wicked smirk that made Shiro’s blush come back double. “Since I’m _spoken for,_ how about _you_ be the one to cover the lunch tab today.”

“Fair enough, I deserved that,” Shiro said with a shake of his head, and followed the older man through the market.


	8. Requisition

“I never would have figured you for a cat person.”

“A what person?” Coran asked, not even looking away from the pointy-eared round ball of grey-blue fur that he’d been happily cuddling in his hands when Shiro had entered the room.

“Cats… They’re kinda like a cross between the lions and this. Small and fuzzy and sharp ears, but with four legs, a muzzle, and a tail. And, uh, _eyes_.” He sank into the chair next to Coran’s and set aside his datapad, notes on Galra ship alarms forgotten for the moment. “What _is_ that, anyway?”

“ _This,_ my friend-" Coran said as he brandished his new companion, "-is a Kittekirri. I was quite surprised when I came across it in the markets. They were on the verge of being overhunted on their native Ellemaki in our time, you see. Nobles on the Jopanna Moons had put out bounties for their coats last I remember, and they were very notorious about their zealotry for fashion. Want to pet it?”

Curious, Shiro stripped off his training glove and reached out to scratch the critter’s ears, finding that it almost felt like grabbing hold of nothing but a ball of rabbit down-fluff. 

“Who’s a good little thatchia puff?” Coran cooed at the kittekirri when it happily fluffed up even more and made a high-pitched trilling little purr in response to the petting. “ _You_ are! You want to stay with us, don’t you? Yes, you _do!_ ”

Shiro bit his lip, trying in vain to hide his grin at the sight of the older man acting like every little old grandmother with a kitten or puppy he’d known back home. “Are you really going to keep it, then?”

“I’m not sure keeping it on a battleship is healthy for it,” Coran admitted, expression finally turning serious as he sank deeper into his chair, settling the creature into his arms. “I don’t regret getting it out of the market, filthy looking place, but it might be best to look into finding it a home on one of our stops.”

Shiro leaned his elbow on the table, resting his chin on his hand. “The companionship might be good for the princess,” he pointed out. It wasn’t _untrue_ , but waving Allura's wellbeing in front of Coran was just a little bit of an underhanded move, and he knew it. The little fuzzball had probably made Coran the happiest he’d seen the Altean in weeks. Like hell he was just going to let the man hand it over to someone else.

“That’s… true.” Coran looked down at the kittekirri, and Shiro was sure it was somehow looking back up at him, even without a face to do it with. "Well then, we’ll just have to go talk to her and see what she thinks,” he said, then got up, still cradling it.

"Nyrr," the puffball agreed.

Shiro followed behind, biting his tongue to keep from laughing.

He had a feeling that the crew was going to be debating names for the critter soon.


	9. Rediscover

_*k-chk*_

_*fwish*_

As Shiro was clicking the band in place on his wrist, the door to the library opened behind him. He turned to greet whoever had entered, but found only empty space.

Weird…

Then another soft swishing noise made him lean over the archivist’s desk, and he grinned. “Hey, Thatchia. Hoping to find a mindless distraction, too?”

“Nyrr,” the kittekirri replied from the floor, ears flicking once.

He rounded the desk and scooped the little puffball up, settling it on his shoulder, and it happily cuddled into his neck as he headed back for the shelves, fiddling with the wristband to calibrate it. Coran and Pidge had been spending their free time lately entering various Earth syntaxes and languages into the coding system the translation bands worked on, and while he wasn’t betting on being able to read any great epics any time soon, he was rather hoping he could at least kill an afternoon.

The shelves almost looked like a scrollery, with thin tubes stacked in neat little rows instead of the books and drawers of mini-chips he was used to. But when he held his wrist up to a tube, it popped out for him to catch and opened a hologram window out of a slot in its side instead of unfolding like paper. “Oh, now that’s just _cool_ ,” he murmured, and Thatchia purred an apparent agreement in his ear.

Unfortunately, the contents weren’t nearly as interesting. After opening several, he determined he was in some sort of reports section, and abandoned it in search of fiction. 

“Mnrrr…”

“Hm? You want down?”

“ _Fssk_.”

“ _Ow,_ geez, okay!” Shiro quickly put the critter back on the floor, and it skittered to a door on the other side of the shelf he’d been getting ready to start on, flattening itself urgently against it. Weird again. “What do you want in there?”

“ _Fssk!”_

 _Really_ weird. He went over and tapped the command control, but nothing happened. Broken, maybe? He ran his fingers along the edge of the control panel, looking for some sort of catch to open it so he could see what the problem might be, then jumped back in surprise when instead he pressed _something_ that made the entire door slide back and to the side. “Whoa. Hey, Thatchia, _wait-”_

The critter ignored him and vanished into the darkness, chirping, and he sighed, cautiously peering in after it. It didn’t _look_ like a trap, but he’d been wrong before… He reached out very slowly for the light panel, prepared for anything that might jump out to try to eat him.

Instead what greeted him when the room hummed to life was a sort of organized chaos. Bits and pieces of half-finished delicate mechanical dolls and other projects, soft chairs and- was that a printing press of some kind? Metal plates were stacked about, and when he picked one up, there were some beautiful designs etched in.

Was this an art studio or some kind of robotics lab?

Or both?

Thatchia was eagerly thumping against a boxy-looking object against the far wall, and when he went to investigate, he found it was a fridge of some sort. “You’re a bottomless pit,” he chided the kittekirri as he ruffled its furr affectionately. 

“Nyrr!”

The cookie-like objects in one of the tins he opened smelled alright -pretty _good_ , actually, considering how long they had to have been sealed up in there- so he let Thatchia munch on them while he continued investigating the room. There were shelves of more holo-tubes, so he went to see if his wristband would work on those.

 _~Property of Hebe and Qirika~_  the first one read. ~ _If found outside of the Castle of Lions, please return to Archivist Michika immediately.~_

Huh. Project records, maybe? That’d be a lot more interesting than weather reports, at least. Shiro swiped to the next page, but was greeted with only a mass of gibberish. He frowned slightly, wondering if he’d come across a language that wasn’t in the translator logs yet, but… No… it was Altean, and being translated to English…

Encoded, maybe?

Well, then.

He bent down and swiped a cookie-thing from the tin Thatchia was scarfing out of, then sat down in one of the soft chairs, beginning to see if maybe any of the codes he knew could break it. 

It was a long shot at the absolute _best_ …

But at least he’d found a way to deal with his boredom.

\---

_~Girls, your mother and I have discussed it with your cousin and his charges, and we have agreed that you may continue your albums.~_

It had taken him nearly six solid hours of patiently noodling through the text little by little, but Shiro had finally managed to break the encryption hiding the contents of the tube. It hadn’t been a cipher at _all_ , but a code built into the data _under_ the words. Pretty genius way to trip up someone who wasn’t sure what to look for, he had to admit.

_~However, you are going to have to be more careful where you keep these. I’ve contacted Archivist Michika about teaching you Old Kingdom Coding, and she has agreed to give you a shelf in the Laiaka Studio. Do well in your studies, and she might be willing to further work with you.~_

_~Papa~_

Huh. Shiro settled back deeper in the squishy chair, re-reading the letter. What kind of ‘album’ could possibly be so important, or threatening, that it would require whole levels of study to hide it? He swiped over to the next page to start looking-

-and nearly choked.

“Is that _Coran_?” he wheezed softly in disbelief, pulling up the picture in full hologram to get a better look.

‘ _Cousin’s the new royal bodyguard!’_ the tiny caption crowed, and, sure enough, the shock of red hair and green markings were unmistakable, but- Shiro felt weirdly numb as he stared at the photo. It probably should have been a lot funnier to see Coran clean-shaven and so rigid and clearly nervous in the face of a bunch of snooty nobles…

He was so _young._

Him and Alfor both. _Everyone._

And it wasn’t just the change in hair, it was… 

He swiped to another page, and Coran was trying to be serious in the face of being hung all over by a pair of twin girls about Pidge’s size.  With green eyes so pale they nearly faded into the whites, light skin and lighter purple markings, petal pink hair that ombred into the same green as their eyes, they were freckle-faced and laughing. The one with braided pigtails was dangling from his back while the one with a wild ponytail had stolen his guard spear. And in the final shot of the set, he’d given up on being the stone-faced royal guard and had them both clutched in a bear-hug, cackling while they squealed in mock-terror.

‘ _Me and Qirika went to see Cousin Coran while the Bosses were in a Meeting.’_

A pretty dark-haired lady with glowing eyes he’d seen in some shots with Alfor was sitting with Coran at a desk, both of them giving some nobles looks that could have set them on fire had they been paying attention. While they continued to be ignored, they seemed to be making some kind of hand signs to each other, trying not to laugh as a result of their silent conversation.

‘ _The Queen and Cousin Coran don’t much like the new Governor of Waypoint Kepii and his entourage.’_

And on, and on…

Set after set.

Picture after picture.

They all seemed so… 

So...

_Alive._

Something nudged his hand, and he looked down to find Thatchia ‘watching’ him, ears twitching nervously. “Nyuw?”

“Hey… I’m okay.”

“Murrew.”

“Really, I’m fine,” Shiro insisted softly, scratching the puffball’s ears. “What do you say we get out of here for now, though, huh? We’ll come back tomorrow.”

“Nyrr.”

He scooped Thatchia off the floor, cradling the kittekirri against his chest as he tucked the tube back into the shelf with the others. He was sure Coran would want to know about these. 

And he was going to tell him. 

Just… maybe later.

After he’d sorted out this strange pain in his chest


	10. Remonstrance

****Allura was smiling.

Allura was smiling _that_ smile.

Allura was smiling _that_ smile that said ‘ _I know something_ ,’ and the mice were cuddled up on her shoulders.

For the very briefest moment, Shiro wondered if a kittekirri’s diet could include mice, and then he felt bad for the thought.

It wasn’t fair to Thatchia.

“Soooo,” Allura said sweetly, sliding into the seat beside him as he hunched over his bowl and wished he could disappear. “You been feeling okay recently?”

“Fine,” he mumbled, proud of himself for his voice not cracking. “Why do you ask?”

“No fevers? No space sickness? No _strange dreams?”_

Oh, God, he was doomed. Maybe he could stuff those mice down a waste chute.

Allura leaned her cheek on her hand and shooed the mice onto the table towards a bowl of hurrok crackers. “Look…” She hesitated, frowning a little as she seemingly fumbled with her words, then sighed. “I’m sorry, I’m going about this wrong.”

Shiro blinked, surprised, then straightened a little, coming out of his defensive shell. “What do you mean?”

“Coran’s practically my second father.” When Shiro opened his mouth to protest, she held up a hand. He closed it and sat back to wait and see what she had to say. “But you are my friend. So this feeling of yours… I’ll give it a chance, as long as you are gentle with him. But if you _hurt him_ in _any_ manner-”

The transformation was subtle, but terrifying. Her teeth sharpened, her markings elongated, and the sclera of her eyes took on a light green glow, all of which he was sure he had seen before, but couldn’t place-

“Then friend or not, Black Paladin or not, you will face _me_.”

Shiro swallowed nervously. “U- understood.”

Holy shit. He'd expected to get the shovel speech some time in his life, but not like this.

And not quite so terrifyingly.

And just like that, the threat display was gone. “I’m glad we had this chat,” Allura said, smiling again as she gathered up her mice and their crackers and left him alone in the kitchen.


	11. Relativity

_“Gravity saves us, gravity loves us,_  
Gravity keeps you here for me to hold  
Sugary crystals sing how you love me  
Showering o’er me in icy cold~”

Shiro glanced up over the holonovella he was reading -sort of- as Coran sailed by, singing to himself while dusting the library shelves. Then he quickly buried himself back into the text.

Not that the translucent data-window did all that much to hide how red his face was. 

Was it _really_ fair for the older man to have a nice singing voice on top of everything else?

“Is that Altean?” he asked, trying his damnedest to stay casual. When he looked up again, Coran was putting more of the data tubes back on one of the shelves he’d finished dusting.

“Yulnadae. Joitree and one of her cohorts were quite fond of playing music in the labs while they worked. Most of it was… hm… what would be the correct genre out of those we discussed last week… electronic ambient? New Age? One of those, I think. But some of the pieces did have words.”

Phew. Okay. Face wasn’t burning so much. This was good. Discussion was good. As long as they were just talking about stuff, he wasn’t… thinking… and getting embarrassed. “What about the others? Did anything they like fit into what we talked about? Or did they like anything at all?” 

“Well, let’s see…” Coran tossed the dusting rag down a chute and sank into a chair, and Thatchia hopped out of Shiro’s lap to go beg to be picked up, which the Altean happily obliged. “Zarkon was never much for music, period. That wasn’t his fault, though. There was an incident during our warband training that damaged the left side of his head and he was never able to handle noise of any kind quite the same since. I have no idea if he still has that weakness, mind you,” he added the second Shiro opened his mouth.

Shiro sank back in his chair with a sheepish grin. “You know me too well.”

“Well, that would have been the smart question to ask,” Coran said simply, and Shiro tried not to blush at the implied compliment. “Now the others… Watersinging was a very particular type of music. I’m not quite sure I could come up with an apt comparison in the things you’ve described to me. I believe Dracha would have been fond of your harps and violins, however. He very much liked things with strings.”

“I bet Mirje would have liked loud things.”

“Oh, and you would have been right. She probably would have _reveled_ in that thing you called… what was it… Industrial? Metal?”

“They’re two different things. But they’re both loud. _Very_ loud.”

“Hah, definitely her tas-.” Thatchia cut into the conversation with a demanding chirp and Coran scratched her ears. “Yes, you living black hole, I am aware it’s dinnertime. Give me a minute to get up.”

Shiro attempted to hide his grin behind the data window as the kittekirri hopped down and began to hiss for food more urgently, and Coran continued to chide the ball of fluff as he followed it out the door.

\---

The studio was calm. Thatchia was snoozing on top of the tiny fridge while Coran sat sorting through his cousins’ printing plates. Shiro had just been taking in the little clinks and purrs, enjoying having some comfortable quiet time after the chaos of their last mission, when curiosity finally needled at him.

“What were those designs for?”

“Hm?”

“All those plates. There aren’t any prints in here.”

“Ah, those two never kept their hard copies. I suspect we’ll find photos of them in the albums, but the prints themselves were always sent out. Shows, friends, competitions. ‘You don’t get more flowers by hiding away the seeds,’ they’d say.”

Shiro looked over at the hitch he heard in Coran’s voice and saw tears pricking the older man’s eyes. Pushing himself up out of the squishy chair, he went over and sat down by the Altean. “Hey-”

Coran gave him a somewhat watery smile, holding up a plate with a rather stunning etching of a geometric starburst mandala. “I’ll be alright, lad. You know… for so many months, I thought the only way to deal with this was to just… get rid of it all. Seal it away.”

“Not think about any of it,” Shiro said, more than understanding.

“Indeed. But now that I’m actually _looking_ at it again, seeing all the hard work they put into these, what they _made_ with these… how can I possibly just hide them and pretend? Even with all the pain, there is beauty in them.”

Shiro hesitated, wondering if he was overstepping some unspoken boundary. But Coran didn’t pull away when he wrapped an arm around his shoulders. In fact, he seemed to lean into it a little. “That’s… that’s a good way of looking at it,” he said, a little surprised as he thought back to his own memories. So much pain. And yet so much had come from it. He had his friends. He had Black. 

Maybe… he had…

“Could you show me more of them?”

“Of course.”


	12. Reaction

*CRACK*

Shiro winced, trying to keep his head down and focus on the holonovel in front of him. After several more minutes of his fingers twitching every time another piece of space junk smacked into the hull, however, he sighed and closed the tube.

Maybe taking a walk would be better.

He shoved the tube back into its place in the archive shelves with a little more force than necessary and left the library, wandering aimlessly along the hallways and trying to clear his mind of the-

*CRACK*

This wasn’t helping.

Shiro took a deep breath. Okay, maybe Coran would know what to do. He felt a little guilty for continuing to lean on the man like this, but… Coran had said to, right? 

He raked his fingers through his hair, trying to think as the clanging outside continued to echo like blaster-fire through the halls. It was almost eighteen-hundred, so Coran would be…. 

He poked his head in the kitchen and found the Altean muttering to himself while repairing one of the food-replicator hoses. He knocked lightly on the doorframe before entering, then approached. “Hey… Coran, I-”

**_*CRACK*_ **

The sound was less like a blaster and more like a grenade. When his rattled nerves had recovered, Shiro blinked.

“Um.”

“What are you guys doing?” Hunk asked from the doorway.

“Huh?” Shiro asked.

Then awareness of his surroundings came back to him like a bolt, and he turned his head to find himself nose to nose with Coran.

Whom he was currently clinging to like a small child.

Holy shit.

He didn’t know whose face was redder, his or the Altean’s, when he immediately let go. “That wasn’t- we weren’t-”

Hunk put up his hands and slowly backed out of the room. “Neeeeevermind. I don’t wanna know,” he said.

Shiro fought down a slight groan and put his hands in his head. “I am so sorry.”

“No harm done,” Coran said, patting him on the back before collecting his tools. “ Might want to look into some fullial root brew to calm down. Space storms are always quite the experience for the experienced.”

Wait a minute…

Shiro stared at the older man’s back as he left. 

Surely he hadn’t meant he'd also…

Had he?


	13. Reoffend

His first moments of consciousness were pain. Rich, nauseating pain resonating from where the base of his skull and his spine connected. Fighting the urge to vomit, he groaned and rolled onto his stomach, finding in the process that his hands were bound behind his back.

“So glad you finally decided to join us, Champion.”

“Shiro, are you alright?”

Like a cold water splash, clarity washed into his brain and he sat up, sickened by the sight of _himself_ standing over Coran, kneeling, bound, and already scruffed and bruised. “ _You-”_

A knife flashed into the other Shiro’s hand and it yanked Coran’s head back, delicately pressing the edge against his throat. “I would advise you to chose your actions _very_ carefully.”

“Ignore this bastard, Shiro. Get yourself out of here,” Coran hissed, but Shiro remained frozen where he was, unwilling to take the chance that the doppleganger would act on the threat.

The smirk it made soured his stomach with hate. “Good boy. I know how you’d hate to damage your _pet_.”

Shiro froze. Did- did that _thing_ just- 

That goddamn _smirk_ widened to an unnatural degree, twisted to something inhuman, as Coran tried to squirm away from the knife, looking at him in confusion. Then before the older man could speak, it crouched down in a flash, clamping a hand over his mouth. “Oh, didn’t you _know_? The _thoughts_ our champion has about you when you aren’t looking? How he _stares?_ ” it purred, pressing even closer until lips grazed the edge of a pointed ear. ”The _dreams_?”

“Shut _up_!” Shiro snapped, managing to lunge to his feet, only to stop as the knife came up again.

“Ah, ah, ah, you stay right there. But don’t worry, champion, you’ll get your first kiss,” the double cooed.

Shiro screamed as, in one horrible motion, the knife slit across Coran’s throat before being plunged into his chest.

The doppleganger dropped Coran to the floor with a casual thud and stepped back, laughing, as the Altean spasmed and choked for air, blue eyes beginning to cloud over. “There! Now you can have anything you want! He’ll never be able to stop you!”

“ _Coran!_ Coran, oh, God, _breathe!_ ” Shiro cried, throwing himself forward despite his bindings. He struggled to activate the prosthetic arm to get himself free, but despite all the modifications they’d made to it together, for some reason, he couldn’t get it to come to life. “Don’t die on me, don’t you _dare_ -!”

Pain erupted in the back of his head again just as he reached the dying Altean.

And everything went white.

—

White light turned to a cold sweat as Shiro folded in on himself, heaving for air. Numb and shaking, he staggered to his feet and stumbled for the nearest can-like object before collapsing to his knees to retch. Only when his stomach had stopped trying to tie itself in a knot did he put a trembling hand to his mouth and try to take in his surroundings.

He wasn’t in his cabin… Where… was…

The sight of stretching rails and padded dueling floors made the past several hours slowly piece back together. Right… right… He’d asked Coran if he could borrow one of the old training halls for some privacy instead of the Paladin practice room. 

He was starting to regret that.

Wait…

Coran.

Not caring about the godawful taste in his mouth, nor the fact that he still felt like utter _shit,_ Shiro lurched to his feet. 

He had to find Coran.

—

The castle was dark and silent, save for the occasional shuffle and snuffle of Thatchia bustling around on her own business, as everyone else was asleep. Which meant Coran would either be on his usual rounds, or down in the old Paladin halls. Desperately praying for the latter, Shiro scooped Thatchia up as he passed the main lifts and headed for the secondaries, collapsing back against the wall when the doors closed them in.

“Fssk!”

“Oh! S-sorry,” Shiro mumbled, loosening his too-tight hold on the kittekirri when she protested his fingers digging into her ears.

“Nyrrer?”

“I’m… fine,” he lied, and he was sure the puffball was somehow giving him a dubious look, even with no face to do so. “I just… I just need to talk to Coran, that’s all.”

“Miurr.”

The lift ride seemed to take three times as long as it usually did. When the doors finally opened, Shiro made a tiny wheeze of relief at seeing the faint orange shaft of light coming from Mirje and Joitree’s old lab.

Coran was crouched beside an inert Smooshy, giving some cables a once over with a tiny glowing tool, and looked up at Shiro’s knock. “Well, hello, wasn’t expecting you toni- sweet stardust, you look like you got in a fight with a gripplesnak.”

“Bad night,” Shiro said, trying to manage a smile to play it off.

He failed miserably.

Coran frowned in worry and put aside his goggles and tools, getting up. “The usual?” he asked, coming over to take Shiro by the shoulders and guide him towards the private kitchen.

Visions of the older man choking on his own blood while _his face_ laughed at him mockingly filled his brain, and Shiro tried to swallow through a throat that suddenly didn’t want to work right. “No… New. _Worse_.”

“Gritka fire. Well, let’s get you brewed up and calmed down before anything else.”

Shiro sat on the stool he was directed to and released Thatchia to snuffle about the table while Coran rifled through the cabinets for the ingredients to their usual calming cup. Trying to keep his breathing even, he buried his head in his hands, spearing his fingers into his hair.

“Want to tell me about it?”

He shivered, feeling his stomach lurch a little. - _”There! Now you can have anything you want! He’ll never be able to stop you!”_ \- He tasted bile in his mouth again.

“I’d rather not.”

“That’s fine, you know you don’t have to.” 

Something warm touched his arm and he reached out blindly for the cana, mumbling his thanks. He barely even tasted the first swig, all of it going to wash his mouth out and burn away the writhing nerves in his stomach. It was only around the fifth that he began to slow down and actually savor the comforting taste.

“Better?”

Shiro rested his chin on his hands and cracked his eyes open to look at Coran -alive, whole, unbound- watching him with gentle concern. Suddenly he felt tired again, but not in such a horrible way. “A little,” he mumbled.

Coran reached over and patted him on the back. “Just take it easy, lad. I’ll stick around as long as you need me.”

_‘That’s almost what I’m afraid of,’_ Shiro thought as he fought down the urge to just give in and lean in to the older man, and instead took another drink.


	14. Recollect

“Sometimes… Sometimes, it’s the fact that I’m still here that kills me. Does that even make any sense? I mean… not even the fact that I had to fight, just… just… that others died and I _didn’t_. Seeing their faces and knowing that could have been me.” 

Shiro raked a shaking hand through his hair and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to ignore the way they burned. They’d had dozens of these kinds of late night talks now; far too many for him to still be feeling the need to cry. And yet here he was…

A hand settled on his back, easing the strain, and a cold bottle pressed lightly against his temple, startling him enough to make him gasp and raise his head. “Wha-” 

“Belai. It’s not alcohol, but it’ll help the nerves.” Coran said, taking a seat beside him on the squishy bench with a bottle of his own before leaning back against the wall. He cracked the seal and stared into it for a long silence before sighing. “Did I ever tell you how Joitree died?”

“The last Red Paladin? N-no… no, I don’t think so.” Shiro opened the dark red bottle. It smelled vaguely gingery. 

He took a swig, and Coran did the same.

It burned a bit, in a good way. He took another.

“It was the last mission they took before Zarkon… turned on us. Something went terribly wrong during the strafing run and she was thrown from her pilot harness all the way across the cockpit. Broke her helmet in half, terrible head injuries. Had to go into cryo as soon as they landed.”

“Oh my _God_ ,” Shiro mumbled. “But shouldn’t she have recovered? I mean, the cryo chambers are-”

“You’d think so, right?” Coran said with a vague little wave of the bottle. “Well, Alfor and Zarkon got into it over the mission. And Zarkon, for lack of a better word, _snapped_. Looking back now, it had been building up for a long time, but at the time, no one saw it coming. One minute they’re yelling at each other over endangering the team, next minute out comes the Black Bayard. And me having been Alfor’s bodyguard for years, well…”

“You didn’t.”

Coran unsnapped the collar of his uniform and pulled the neck of the undersuit aside, revealing quite possibly the most horrible scar Shiro had seen outside of his own arm. “I did. And into cryo I went, three chambers over from Joitree.” 

An uncomfortable, tense silence fell over the room as Coran took another long pull off his drink and closed up his uniform, but Shiro didn’t push.

Didn’t dare.

Finally, Coran took a deep breath, the sound of the inhale sharp. “Five days later, I woke up to alarms. Medics. Soldiers. Panic. Chaos. They’re carrying me out of the room half-senseless and I see her on the floor, foaming at the mouth, eyes rolled back in her head, the chamber they pulled her from smoking.” 

Shiro pressed the bottle tightly to his mouth to stave off a bitter wave of nausea. He’d seen pictures of the tiny Paladin in the cousins’ archives, her bright smile, her sharp eyes, wit and challenge leaking from every expression. Trying to picture her as Coran had last seen her- 

And then it hit him. “It wasn’t an accident.”

Coran shook his head. “The Galra… never _officially_ claimed responsibility for poisoning her ventilation system, but they intentionally leaked enough clues that it was their fault. They wanted us to know. Mirje specifically.” He put aside the empty bottle. “I won’t go into _that_ one tonight. But I was _there._ I was  _three chambers away._ Zarkon had nearly taken my head off once, and it would have been that easy to just flood all the chambers. But I lived, and she didn’t.”

Shiro swallowed. “That… that emptiness in the eyes when they go. Do you ever stop seeing it in your sleep?”

The look Coran gave him, tired and fond and sad all at once hurt. “I wish I could say yes. The most I can say is that the visions come and go. You'll have months that don't bother you at all and weeks the guilt will make you not want to get out of bed. The best you can do is try to… balance the scales… as it were. They can’t save a life anymore, so you do it in their place. Keep living for them. That sort of thing. Get me?”

He considered that, fiddling with the bottle in his hands and running his fingers over the raised bits of glass that made up the label. Then Shiro blew out a breath and smiled hesitantly. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I get it,” he murmured, then settled deeper into his seat and finished off the bottle in one swig.


	15. Resurrect

Shiro scowled at the floating tetrahedron in front of him, parsing the positions of the squiggling little alien pieces, then chose the little armored multi-eyed thing and moved it four spaces left and around a corner, capturing a fuzzy thing holding an axe. The axe-wielding piece vanished into the center of the board, signifying he’d made a correct move, and he brightened. “I think I’m finally getting the hang of this.”

Silence.

“Coran?” He peered around the game and found Coran looking off in the direction of the inert robot beside one of the control consoles, apparently lost in thought. “Hey, Coran.”

The older man blinked, then seemed to come back to himself. “Hm? Oh, beg your pardon. My turn, is it?” He squinted at the board. “Let’s see… Jumal Knight to Hellu Mercenary! Good Job, lad!”

“Thanks. Uh, you okay? You’ve been staring at that droid a lot since… well, since the night you told me about the cryos.”

“Have I?” Coran asked as he moved a piece made up of wriggling little tentacle arms to snag one of Shiro’s froggy things with four extra legs. “Just… absent thinking, I suppose.”

Damn, that left his king… or the snakey-looking creature that was sort of like his king, in trouble. “About what?” Shiro asked as he moved one of his own fuzzy axe creatures to try and protect it.

“Well, I found some of his old maintenance records. None of the command codes are in them, of course.” A sword-wielding…something or other was moved around a corner, putting his king in danger from another direction. “Joitree never would have put those to data, not even here. But there are enough diagrams and notes to give a nearly complete systems schematic.”

Shiro frowned, trying to figure out how he was going to get himself out of this. “Nearly complete as in _repairable_ nearly complete?” he asked, finally deciding to just move his king out of the line of fire.

Bad move. The tentacle thing just chased him into another death trap. “That’s the million yukalla question, it seems. The last thing I’d want to do is leave the poor fellow in pieces,” Coran replied.

The only safe spot was around the corner, but that put him too close to a froggy thing. Shiro decided to chance it.  “Hm… Why not get Hunk or Pidge to help? Three mechanical brains would be better than one, wouldn’t-” He couldn’t see Coran’s face, but he could practically feel the atmosphere in the room change. “Still not sure about letting them mess with your friend’s tech yet?”

“It’s quite irrational, I know-”

“Not really. I mean, for us, this stuff is thousands of years old, but isn’t like that for you and Allura.” Shiro looked down at the new arm they’d built for him, the thin pink lines in their little geometric patterns that matched Smooshy’s design. “How long has he _really_ been asleep?”

There was a long pause, and then a deep sigh from the other side of the board.  ****“Seventeen years, nine moons, and twenty-three days.”

“There, see? That’s not nearly enough time for an Altean, is it?”

More silence. Then, after several tics, Coran made a soft hum of thought. “You have a point. But it _is_ too long for him to have been collecting dust. The big tin can was always such a grouch when he had nothing to do.”

“So you’re going to fix him?” Shiro asked, then sat up indignantly when Coran’s froggy thing swiped his king. “Hey!”

“An excellent game, but I am still the master!” Coran said with an unrepentant grin as the board vanished and he got up. “And the answer is yes!”  ****Coran walked over to the central computer core on Joitree’s side of the lab and began putting in the codes to bring up the records he’d been sifting through the week before. “Let’s see… Sector nine… Log Twelve… Hmm…”

“Anything I can do to help?” Shiro asked.

“I may or may not need a second pair of hands, I’m not sure yet. I’ll definitely need help with the tools, though, and it will take both of us to get him out here to work on since the cranes don’t seem to be in functioning order.”

Shiro eyed the ten-foot-tall droid dubiously as he got up from his chair. “ _Just_ us?”

“Oh, yes, he’s quite light for his size. Around three hundred parchaks.”

“Is that like a kilogram the way a tic is almost like a second?”

Coran paused, looking up from the command screen. “You know… that’s a very good question. We better test real quick.” He looked through some pieces of machinery that lay in a container on a nearby shelf, testing their weights until he was satisfied. “Alright, this is a parchak. See how it feels,” he said, handing it to Shiro. 

Shiro hefted it up and down with his flesh hand, getting a feel for it. “A little bit heavier. But not bad. We should be okay.”

“Good! I have the files ready, all we need to do is get Smooshy in position and open his core panel up.”

The positioning proved to be a bit more difficult than they had expected. The gap had obviously been designed to fit Smooshy, and his shape wasn’t exactly conducive to moving him without his own or mechanical assistance. 

“Maybe… the cranes… should be next… on the repair list…” Coran puffed when they’d finally managed to drag the robot out of his hidey-hole without tipping him over to crash onto the floor.

“Good idea,” Shiro gasped as he leaned on the console.

Coran blew out his breath, then sucked in a gasp of air to get himself steady again and straightened. “Alright, then. This part shouldn’t be too bad,” he said, tossing the end of a length of cable to Shiro. “We need to gently get him face down on the floor so we can get to his back panel.” 

“You sure that’s going to be easier?”

“His leg joints are still quite limber, so we just need to get him bent down far enough, and then pull his legs out from under him, which is what the cable’s for.”

“Oh. That _doesn’t_ sound too bad.”

Working together, they managed to lie the robot down without breaking any of his more delicate parts. “Phew. Alright. See that tiny hook tool next to your right hand? There are catches for the core compartment under the seam here, here, and here,” Coran said, indicating the correct spots and also pointing them out on the schematic that was on the console screen. “Disconnect those so we can pop him open.”

Pip.

Pip.

Pip.

**_BEEP._ **

Shiro backed away from the robot in alarm as its insides began to glow. “Uh, is it supposed to do tha-”

**_“HEY!”_ **

A holo so red it hurt his eyes  _boiled_ up out of the open panel, jittering and glitching before it solidified into a _very_ enraged Joitree.  _“ **You!** ”_ she snapped, pointing a claw at Shiro.  _“What do you think you’re-”_ she cut off at the sight of his arm, but if anything, it only seemed to make her _angrier. “You underhanded, greedy- … **pechu-worm!** You thought you could steal **my** work! Well, let’s see how you like a **self-destruct** , you **jerk!** Activation in 10! 9-!”_

 _“Coran!”_ Shiro yelped urgently, recoiling. “A little help would be nice!”

Armed with some sort of cutters at the ready to disable the robot permanently if necessary, the older man quickly interposed himself between him and the angry hologram. “A- ah, um,  six jars of julpara cream orbs and… and a fist in Ponakka’s face!”

Before Shiro could ask what the hell _that_ was supposed to mean, the holo scattered, glitching several times before it slowly reconstructed itself from the bottom up in the normal dark pink of Joitree’s work, looking extremely confused.  _“Klaka?”_ she asked, before floating up to look behind him at Shiro suspiciously.  _“Then who’s **this** keptak? And why are you two rummaging around in Smooshy’s guts?”_

Coran cautiously lowered the cutters, and Shiro finally started breathing again. “An assistant and a patient,” Coran said. “I borrowed some of yours and Mirje’s tech for his arm because the two of you did such a good job on me. But, to be completely frank, the reason we’re working on Smooshy is… because you aren’t here to do it anymore.”

 _“…Oh. Well. I guess even **my** brilliant mind didn’t crack the key to immortality, then,” _ the holo replied.

It was very subtle. A little shift in the eyes, a little droop in the ears. A smirk that wasn’t quite as challenging as usual. But he could tell that the idea of being _dead_ was a lot more of a bother than she was letting on, and from the way Coran tensed up just a little, he could tell, too. 

Shiro bit his lip, then gently tapped the older man on the shoulder. “Um, maybe, since she’s here, she could help us, though?” he suggested softly.

“Oh? Oh! Excellent idea, Shiro! It would be just like old times! I don’t know if the original let you in on any of Smooshy’s command codes, but any assistance you could provide, we would be most grateful for. And… also for the company?”

 _“This program is only designed to last for five cycles at the most,”_ the holo replied, then, slowly, a grin spread across her face.  _“But… yeah. That sounds fun. For old time’s sake. Let’s get to work.”_

_—_

_“What_  is that noise?” Keith asked at the rhythmic thumping that was coming down the hall, and Coran and Shiro just traded secretive smiles over their bottles of Borrakkhan Root Soda.

It was nearly to the door when Allura perked up. “Wait. I know that sound,” she said, before her head whipped in Coran’s direction. “You didn’t find him, did you?” she asked, wide-eyed.

“Maybe we did, maybe we didn’t,” Coran said mysteriously, making the other Paladins give him confused looks as Allura jumped from her seat with a delighted squeal and ran to the dining room door.

Only for mouths to drop open at the massive ovaloid robot that clumped through when they swished open. “Smooshy! You're back!” Allura crowed, throwing her arms around as much of the robot as she could, and the robot beeped and twittered happily as it caught her in its stumpy three-fingered arms.

“ _Smooshy?”_ Lance and Keith asked in disbelieving chorus as Pidge stared at the massive droid as if she’d just found a giant Christmas present and Hunk aww’d at how cute the picture of it and the princess hugging made.

Shiro and Coran just clinked their bottles together, grins growing wider.


	16. Reason

 

This was entirely unfair, Shiro thought as he scrubbed his face with his metal hand in an attempt to cool off the embarrassment. 

Maybe he was going insane. He was fairly certain normal guys his age didn’t get this flustered over a simple kissing fantasy in their sleep.

And that was _all_ it had been. At least he was pretty sure of it. He didn’t exactly want to do a play by play in his head to find out when he was already practically glow-in-the dark pink. 

All of this stupidity had started from such innocent wondering, too, hadn't it? He liked being the one looked after for a change instead of having to be the stalwart all the time. He'd discovered that calloused hands looking after his injuries or holding him up after a nightmare was a pretty comforting feeling. He’d just found himself curious whether being kissed by a certain someone with a mustache would tickle or no-

Aaaand his face was on fire again. Cursing under his breath, Shiro rolled out of bed and headed to the small half-bath connected to his cabin. What was he, _twelve? Teenagers_ didn’t get like this over the thought of getting kissed.

Did they? Maybe it just took thinking about someone in particular?

Like hell he was going to _ask._ Bad enough he was already getting the teasing from Allura, if he brought it up with the others, he’d never hear the end of it. Especially from Pidge. Especially from _Lance_.

He’d just… distract himself or something. That was easy enough. There were a hundred thousand things in the castle to study, even with Coran, that could occupy… _that_ space in his brain, he was sure.

Yeah.

That would totally work.

He just had to be on his guard and keep from getting blindsided any time soon, that was all.

-

“Um.”

That was most likely the least eloquent response he could have made, but it was all the response his brain would supply. 

Beyond staring. 

Thankfully, Allura saved him with a gentle elbow in the ribs, finally kicking his brain back into gear before he could really embarrass himself. “It’s… different.”

Great save, there, Shirogane. 

By some grace of any higher power listening, Coran was too busy being affronted by Lance’s jokes at his expense to notice his own awkward tripping over his words. When the Altean finally _did_ turn in his direction, newly long hair sweeping like he’d fallen out of a Tolkien novel, Shiro had finally recovered enough to manage full sentences and stop blushing the way the protagonists in his older sister's romance novels did.

Mostly.

“You’re hopeless,” Allura said with a grin when Coran had gone back to fighting with the ship’s controls.

“Hush,” Shiro replied mock-sharply, then bit his lip. “Think we can convince him to keep the look awhile?” he asked after a few seconds of tense silence, voice a little more strained than intended.

Allura’s grin widened, turning a touch evil. “You owe me a crate of pethana snacks on our next supply stop and I’ll have the mice hide his trimming tools.”

“Deal.”


	17. Ribbing

It was a rare night when it wasn’t nightmares that had him roaming the halls, just good old fashioned insomnia. Thatchia perched on his shoulder and a cana of not-chocolate in hand, Shiro meandered aimlessly for a bit, peering through this window and that, before deciding to head up to the command system for a bit. Though they didn’t always help him sleep, the star maps were always nice to study. And gaining a little extra information on this corner of the universe never hurt either.

He blinked in surprise when the door swished open and he found Coran sitting at the central console, arms folded as he stared at some blinking signals. “Hey.”

The Altean didn’t respond. 

Strange.

Thatchia murred at him, but he ignored it, reaching out to tap Coran on the shoulder-

-then jumped back with a yelp when the older man started, _something_ flickering in his eyes as he whipped around in his chair. “ _Whoa!_ It’s just me!” he said, fumbling to keep a hold on the cana as Thatchia hissed in alarm.

“Wha- oh. Oh, it _is_  just you. Terribly sorry, you two. Seems I dozed off for a minute, there,” Coran said, then stretched.

Shiro stared at him. “You were sleeping? But your eyes were-”

“Inner eyelid, lad.” Coran pointed to his eyes, illuminated in the dim light, and they did that weird _flicker_ again. “All Alteans have them. Very useful for napping on sentry duty, I must say.” 

Shiro bit his tongue, trying to keep from grinning. It didn’t work. “Unless you got caught by another Altean, I bet.”

“Hm, naturally, everything has its downsides. What brings you up here?”

“The usual,” he said, sacking into another seat and moving Thatchia onto a console so she could snuffle around. “What are you doing?”

“Updates. Infernally slow, tedious nonsense.”

“I guess some things are the same no matter what civilization you’re in,” Shiro said wryly, tapping through the screen commands for the star maps. When they came up and expanded to fill the room, he relaxed a bit and took a sip from the cana, using his free hand to scan through the little points of light until he found where he’d left off the last time. “Hey, Coran?”

“Hm?”

“What do these little symbols next to some of these stars mean?”

The older man got out of his chair, coming over to lean down and squint, then his expression changed, becoming… sort of soft. “Oh, those are where important release ceremonies offworld from Altea were performed.”

“Release?”

“Funeral rites. You see, when we die, we are reduced back to our base elements and then sent back into space in the hopes that we’ll become part of the cycle again.”

Shiro felt his mouth pull into a small smile. “Star stuff.”

“Come again?”

“There was an astrophysicist in my astronomical history course who had a good bit about how since the elements all living things were made of came from dying stars, we were all made of star stuff.”

Coran brightened, “Well, yes, that’s it exactly! Go on-”

—

“That’s interesting. Only five minutes penalty box for brawling?”

“Well, it depends on what kind of brawling. There’s high-sticking, cross-checking, ice-boarding-”

“Are you two seriously talking about _hockey_ at this hour?” Lance grumbled as he stumbled in with a yawn, followed by the others, who were being herded by a very chipper Allura.

Shiro gave him a sheepish grin. “Would you believe we started out with Sagan?”

“Weirdos.”


	18. Revelation

“That can’t be right.”

Shiro looked over to find Coran staring intently at a star map projecting from one of the command consoles, a deep frown etched on his face. “What’s the matter?” he asked as Allura approached to look over her retainer’s shoulder.

“There’s a beacon signal going off in this sector here,” Coran said, indicating with a gloved finger. “But there aren’t any planetary systems there.”

“Perhaps we should investigate nonetheless?” Allura suggested. “It could be a wormhole-damaged ship.”

“That’s very true,” Coran conceded, beginning to enter the commands to try and get a lock on the tiny flashing dot. 

Curious, Shiro went to watch, but quickly stepped back when both of them suddenly went rigid. “What? What’s wrong? Are they enemies?”

“No,” Allura said, voice weak. “But the signal, it’s- It _can’t_ be-”

Coran’s expression was like stone. “There’s no mistake. It’s in Altean.”

—

The castleship exited the wormhole, and it immediately became clear _why_ the beacon seemed to have been coming from dead space. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Coran said. “A rogue planet.”

“What’s a rogue planet?” Lance asked.

“C’mon, man, it was on last semester’s astronomy test,” Hunk said, folding his arms to lean on an unused console. “Orphan planet, wandering planet, none of ‘em ring a bell?” 

Lance scratched his head. “Uh… oh! No star, free-floaters, right?”

“Correct,” Coran said, setting the ship’s orbit. “Our last star map update probably didn’t note its presence here. There’s no telling where it’s actually come from. The important thing right now, though, is to find out what it’s hiding. Everyone, suit up.”

“Everyone as in you two, too?” Pidge asked.

“Well, of course,” Allura said, her expression determined as she picked up her helmet from the floor beside the console. “If there’s even the slightest chance of survivors down there, we’re going to find them.”

—

Easier said than done. Storms buffeted the lions the whole way down through the thickly clouded atmosphere, and keeping their feet once they reached the ground proved difficult.

And it was goddamn _cold._ Shiro was suddenly extremely grateful for the temperature regulation of the armor, and pulled the full mask down to protect his face as well. The others followed suit, gathering in against the wind as they followed the tracking device Coran held.

His first thought when they found it was that he was surprised to see it still in one piece. If it had been here since the Galra war, he had been expecting little more than bits and pieces after ten thousand years of being beaten to hell by these storms. “Not bad, huh, Coran?”

No response.

“Coran?” Shiro reached out and shook the older man, but the Altean still stood frozen where he’d stopped in front of the ship. Worried, he moved up beside him and found Coran staring at the remains of the name etched on the side looking as if he’d been punched in the stomach. 

Or seen a ghost.

Or worse.

“Coran?”

And then Coran broke away from them, going for the gaping hole of a torn-off door at a dead run.

—

They caught up to him in what had been the command center. It had been an uncomfortable trip -for Allura especially- passing bodies that had seemingly been perfectly preserved where they fell by the cold. He didn’t seem to hear them burst in, hunched over the central console and busily tying away at some kind of code.

“Shit, man,” Keith said. “What the hell…”

Whatever he’d been about to chew Coran out with died out as a holoscreen suddenly flared to life, a panicked man’s face illuminated by emergency lights and his voice nearly drowned out by alarms.

_“Ullal Station, this is the Curiosity! We have Queen Illyere and her retinue aboard and we have been caught in a waypoint anomaly! Requesting immediate assistance! I repeat, **immediate assista-** ”_

The holo jittered and exploded before collecting back together in a much smaller, blinking screen, as if waiting for something.

—

Outside, the wind howled.

But Shiro was sure he could hear each of the others breathing.

Allura didn’t look too good, he realized almost at the same moment that Hunk did, but Hunk was closer, and quickly caught the princess before she could hit the floor.

“Mother?” she asked, her voice so small that it sounded more like just air escaping from her lungs.  _“This… was Mother’s…?"_  

Coran hadn’t moved from where he stood at the console, back rigid and fingers still pressing into the touchscreen so hard that Shiro wasn’t sure what would give first, the console, or his bones. He bit his lip then, very slowly so as not to startle the older man, stepped up and put a hand on his back. 

Coran silently took a shuddering breath, then punched the command to open the blinking screen.

—

_We’ve tried every possible communication frequency. Nothing penetrates the storms except the emergency beacon. Thank the Glories for the Queen. Even though some refuse to respect her blood, she tirelessly works to keep spirits up and keep supplies evenly distributed. She is fair where others are not. I have seen her refuse food to keep others fed. I have seen others steal more than their share. There are fights._

_++_

_We found sustenance today. Little grows, very little, but it won’t kill us. Still no response to the beacon. The thieves are stepping up their cruelty. The Queen has to fight for us with more than just words. She fights like a demon. I never thought I would see blood on her hands. But she surprises me as well. She saved me from losing my arm._

_++_

_What grows is gone. The storms are stronger. Our supplies are growing fewer. There is one salvation left. The long-journey cryochambers. Michi heard the thieves talk of claiming them for themselves and leaving the rest of us to die. What our kinsmen have become terrifies me. I fear what will happen if they ever make it back to Altea. And I will not let them harm the Queen, not after what she’s done for us._

_++_

_The thieves are growing still more vicious. Michi is dead. The Captain is dead. The Helmswoman is dead. I have heard the crunching. I fear they are doing more than just killing. We who are left have to get to the cryochambers. We will not let them win._

_++_

_The Queen sleeps. The thieves are angry. I am the only one left. My name is Theilli, technician of the Curiosity, sister of Michi, daughter of Theran and Hecha. If you find this, know that I did my best. I did my duty._

_—_

Lance finally broke the heavy weight of silence that settled into the static of the finished log. “So… where are the cryos in this thing?”

As if he’d finally been awoken from a trance, Coran turned away from the holoscreen. “One floor down from the infirmary,” he said, voice rough. Shiro kept close in case the older man started to buckle.

One glance at Hunk and Allura told him the same thing, and Pidge had taken to hovering on her other side as they all made their way towards the lifts.

The door had to be wrenched open and actual elevator appeared to be stuck somewhere in the floors below. The lights were still on, unlike the corridors to the command room, so that was a relief. At least they weren’t going to be dropping into a black pit. “Alright, everybody, jets active, stick close to the walls to catch yourself if you have to,” Shiro said, and down they went.

Even with their armored suits, the temperature change in the cryo room was immediately evident. A couple of them swore, huddling in against the cold. “What gives?” Pidge muttered through chattering teeth.

“It’s the old ventilation system,” Coran replied. “Before they used the closed-pod chambers like we have on the castle.” 

There was something in his expression Shiro didn’t like. He wondered for a moment if seeing the old chambers had made him think about Joitree. But whatever had been there, it was gone in a flash, and the smooth stone expression had returned as Coran tapped the control to turn on the lights in the room.

The difference was evident immediately, all of the cryochambers laid on their backs like iron lungs Shiro had seen in old pictures, their polymer windows frosted over. One by one, Coran went to each, wiping at the smooth surface to get a look inside.

Fourth down, almost at the center of the room, he stiffened and waved them over.

Shiro recognized her almost immediately. The dark-haired lady in the cousins’ archival photos. The one who’d always been laughing and joking with Coran. The one who walked arm in arm with Alfor. The one who swung a tiny princess Allura in her arms.

And there was a fine mist of breath against the window.


	19. Revive

It was nine hours of logistical _hell._

After an intense study of the stranded ship’s cryochamber systems, Coran had come to the conclusion that un-chambering the queen planetside had too many risk factors, the _least_ of which would be the cold. 

Which wasn’t to say that the plan to get the chamber she was in to the castle didn’t have its _own_ drawbacks. Smooshy would have to be brought down to the _Curiosity_ to power the chamber once it was disconnected from the ship’s systems, and since his short-flight rockets weren’t powerful enough to support him through the storms, that meant Yellow and Black were going to have to go back up to the Castleship to retrieve him.

Shiro tried not to drum his fingers against the control consoles as they made their way back down through the treacherous atmosphere, the droid clinging to Black's back with Yellow flying close by in case the wind somehow managed to tear him loose. “This is going to work, isn’t it?” he asked to no one in particular, but Black rumbled a soft, comforting affirmative in the back of his mind that made a little bit of the tension in his spine ease.

“All right,” Coran said once Smooshy had been hooked in and the cryochamber had been pulled out of its base. “Our clanky friend here can support the weight of the chamber himself, so what the rest of us need to do is circle round it and make sure it doesn’t bump into the walls as we go up the elevator shaft.”

“What are we gonna do once we get it outside?” Pidge asked. “I thought you said Smooshy can’t fly that high, or in these storms.”

“He can’t. What we’re going to do is put the chamber behind the pilot harness in the Black Lion. She’s the only one big enough to have the space for it. And then Smooshy will ride on the back of her neck, with the cable connection through the side of her mouth. You good with that, Shiro?”

He looked at the chamber, frowning a little as he tried to calculate the sizes in his head. It _should_ fit… He would have to keep his full-face mask the entire time and bump the temperature of his armor up a bit to make up for the chill of the ventilation slots, though. “Yeah, it’s fine.”

“Wait,” Allura protested. “Neither you, nor I will fit with them. We won’t be able to keep an eye on her!”

“Smooshy will monitor everything going on in the chamber's circuitry functions,” Coran said gently, squeezing her shoulder. “He’ll be able to compensate for any changes through his connection faster than you or I would.”

“And I’ll be in full contact,” Shiro promised. “If _anything_ changes on the way back up, I’ll let you know.”

Allura clearly didn’t look happy, but after a moment, she screwed herself up straight  and gave a sharp nod. “Alright, let’s go. The longer we wait, the harder this will be.”

—

The cold ended up bothering him less than the creeping feeling up his spine the whole flight up. Logically, he _knew_ the queen was alive in her cryo, but the chill and stillness left him with the constant feeling that he was transporting a morgue.

He was more than a little relieved when they were back in the hanger and Black opened her mouth and Smooshy wedged himself in to pull the chamber out.

The seven of them fell in behind the robot as he carried the cryo down to _their_ cryo room, to the more familiar closed-chamber pods, and carefully set it down in the center of the ring to be hooked up to the assorted machinery Smooshy had gathered on Coran’s orders before joining them at the _Curiosity_. “Anything we can do to help?” Hunk asked.

“I could use some hands for collecting readouts, if anyone wants to volunteer,” Coran replied as he crouched behind the head of the chamber. “I need to get this thing back up to protocol standards before I start trying to revive her.”

“She’s been in a _degrading chamber_ all this time?!” Allura asked with more than a little alarm, and Pidge quickly put a hand on her back to steady her before she could do something rash.

“Well, it’s not… that bad… maybe… it’s a little hard to explain,” Coran said hesitantly. “The entire ship was designed to funnel power to key positions were it to be stranded. Emergency signals, living quarters, life pods, cryos. The life pods would have been destroyed in the crash. There was nothing left in the living quarters to trigger the necessity. So that left the beacons and the cryos. But the sheer length of time that ship’s been there and the amount of damage it took in the crash and from the storms affected the amount of power it had to keep both running.”

“How much longer do you think it could have lasted if we didn’t come by?” Keith asked.

Coran pulled at his mustache, looking extremely uncomfortable and anywhere except them. “About… fifteen, twenty years, I’d say.”

It was as if the air had gone out of the room. Lance turned away, scratching at the back of his neck. Hunk looked like he was going to throw up. 

“Only… twenty…” Shiro quickly grabbed a chair for Allura to sit, and she put her head in her hands. “We could have missed her _forever_  by only twenty-”

“But we didn’t!”

They all looked at Pidge, who’d puffed herself up with a serious expression. “We found a _lost queen._ Someone _nobody else could find_ in _thousands of years._ That means we can find _anybody,_ right?”

Hunk perked up. “Hey, yeah. We _can_ find anybody,” he said, elbowing Shiro. “Like lost scientists, too!”

Shiro couldn’t help a grin. “Paladins of Finding, that’s us.”

Allura managed a watery smile at their confidence, feigned or not. “That’s true. So…” she turned to Coran. “Whatever you have to do, then.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

—

“There we go.”

They all stopped what they were doing when Coran spoke up. “We go? We’re done?” Lance asked, putting down a datapad that was still scrolling numbers.

“We’re done,” Coran agreed with a nod. “Her vitals are now exactly what they should be. Unfortunately, that means I’m going to need you all to leave now.”

“What?” Allura asked, voice slightly brittle as she stood up. “You can’t be serious! I’m not going to _leave_ right when she’s-”

“ _Allura.”_ Coran stopped her by catching her arms, looking her dead in the eye. “Do you remember how disorienting it was for us to look at the maps? The time logs? The _records_?”

“I…” The princess bit her lip, then nodded.

“Imagine what it’s going to be like for _her_ to look at an almost grown woman claiming to be her daughter when she left behind a toddler.” The older Altean gently put a hand on his charge’s head, and Shiro directed the others toward the door, following them. “Half a cycle, sweetbug,” he heard Coran saying behind them. “Just give me that much to start catching her up to speed.”

He didn’t hear Allura’s reply, but a little over a minute later, the princess joined them in the hall, trying in vain to hide a sniffle. “Hey, it’ll be fine,” he said, trying to be reassuring.

“Yeah, just think about how glad she’s gonna be to see you again,” Hunk said.

“But Coran’s right,” Allura mumbled. “There’s so _much_ -”

“That can wait, though, can’t it?” Lance asked. “Big messy crying reunions now, sad stuff later.”

“Hey guys, he’s opening the pod,” Pidge said, standing on tiptoes to peer through the window of one of the doors. All of them crowded in, trying to get a glimpse.

Her markings looked different from the photos. Sharper. Her eyes were dull. Tired. There were more of the pale pink streaks in her hair. She was _thin_ , and Shiro remembered with a slight wince the mentions of starvation in the logs left behind by the last surviving loyal tech.

Coran had changed as well, becoming more like the younger man in the pictures from the twins’ archive, but as the pair talked, their words silenced by the doors, Shiro could see him changing, slowly, subtly. 

Or at least subtly until the mustache sprouted like an erupting bush of flame.

That got the dimmed, diminished queen to laugh, _finally_ , and some of her glow returned briefly in the mirth before exhaustion stole it again and she had to lean on her former retainer for support, which Coran seemed more than happy to give. 

After what seemed like an eternity, Coran helped the woman to sit on the edge of the chamber she’d been pulled from and approached the doors. He made a slight face of exasperated amusement when he saw them all clustered in the window, then signaled Allura to come in.

“Okay?” Shiro asked.

“Okay,” Allura said, squaring her shoulders, and, with encouraging pats from him and the rest, she tapped the door controls and entered the room, taking hold of Coran’s hand when she met him halfway.

They filled in the space she’d left, holding their breath.

Motion seemed to follow seconds, and seconds seemed to tick by more and more slowly.

At Coran’s call, Illyere stood and turned, and the way her eyes went wide, stunned and confused and lit with recognition all at the same time made Shiro’s chest freeze.

But when she sank to her knees, tears beginning to stream down her face, and Allura ran to throw herself down and hug her, he let out the air in his lungs in a rush before swallowing. “C’mon, guys. Let’s give them awhile.”

“Yeah,” one of the others mumbled, he wasn’t paying attention to whom, and they moved away from the window one by one, separating to go find somewhere else to be.


	20. Realign

It had become a sort of ritual. Check the cabins first, then go searching the castle. He and Coran tended to do it the most, and had made a sort of catalog of where to find everyone.

Naturally, whenever no one could locate Coran, the two most common places for him to be were in his cousins’ archive or in the Old Paladins’ hall, and while the former had become more open to the rest of the crew since the Queen had been woken up, the latter was still more or less just “their” haven.

For his own part, he’d been spending more and more time up in the command center with the star maps. Now that he had both Coran and Queen Illyere to teach him, they’d been even more of a source of comfort when the nightmares came. And when he didn’t doze there, he was usually down in the Old Paladins’ hall with Coran, dozing in the lab while the latter worked. 

Keith, they’d had to start locking out of the main training round. Not that it had stopped him. Shiro had started finding him curled up on the dueling floors of the old training halls in the past weeks. He was going to have to talk to Coran or Allura about putting curfews on that floor as well, somehow.

Pidge was usually found in a tech repair tunnel somewhere, and usually by Coran running systems diagnostics until he found the hiccup that heralded whatever system she’d been digging into until she passed out. After the fifth time in as many days that they’d had to fish her out of a pile of wires and clean up spilled stimulant juice, Shiro was starting to wonder if they shouldn’t restrict the stuff.

Hunk, Lance, and Allura, thankfully, had the sense to just sleep on couches whenever they crashed outside of their rooms. A blanket tossed over them, a pillow tucked under their heads, and everything was hunky-dory. Unless Allura didn’t _want_ to be moved in her sleep. He’d learned the hard way to watch her reactions better after he’d had to have the hand of his metal arm reattached.

Thatchia wasn’t a problem… most of the time. _Some_ of the time. Keith had gotten a face-full of angry hissing kittekirri when he’d blindly reached into a cabinet and none-too-gently grabbed the puffball in the middle of a nap by accident. They’d _all_ learned to be more careful about where they stuck their hands after that. 

And as for their newest crew member… Shiro looked up from his notes as Illyere ghosted past on her way to the kitchen. It wasn't her fault at all, but she unnerved him in a way he couldn’t explain. The only time he’d ever actually seen _her_ sleep was that first time she’d been curled up with Allura after she’d been brought out of cryo. Other than that, she was always awake when they all crashed, and awake when they all got up. 

He chewed uncertainly at his lip, then put ‘to be determined’ on his notes, continuing to watch her out of the corner of his eye.

-

They had been in orbit over Mepthelo for two days when he noticed the light was on in the hidden archives during one of his night walks. Since he'd seen Coran doing repairs up near the main lifts not twenty minutes earlier, he approached with caution, knocking on the doorframe to announce his presence. 

Queen Illyere, seated on one of the soft benches by the back shelves, lifted her gaze from the archive holo she was reading. "Come in."

Shiro hesitated on seeing who was actually occupying the room. "Ah- sorry, I can come back another-"

She tilted her head slightly, the motion almost bird-like, and then her blank expression... softened. "If anyone is intruding, wouldn't it be me? Have a seat."

Shiro took one of the squishy chairs that he usually favored when Thatchia was visiting the archives with him, then frowned as he parsed what she'd said. "But... this is your  _home_ , your high- er, majesty."

"Just Illyere," she replied, closing the holo with a soft flicker and snap. "And is it? Some would have said it never was to begin with. And even were they wrong, there is nothing left of me here," she said, running her claws over the metal tube. "I've missed entire lifetimes."

Looking down at his hands, Shiro bit his lip, feeling a coldness settle in him at the _emptiness_ that seemed to radiate from her, where there had seemed to be such a fire in the woman in the photos. Suddenly, he wanted to ask what had  _happened_ on the  _Curiosity._ How long they'd waited in vain before finally resorting to the cryos as a last-ditch effort of survival.

He swallowed and glanced over, seeing the way her fingers twitched, claws scratching little ruts in the tube.  _That,_ he _did_ recognize. He sometimes caught his own hands doing it when he was nervous. A holdover from...

From...

"It's brutal, isn't it?" he asked softly. "When your only choice is to kill or die."

Illyere glanced at him sidelong, but he saw it. The faint flicker of a kindred recognition. "You've been there."

Shiro nodded. "It was..." He had to stop for a moment and take a deep breath. "The Galra threw me in the gladiator pits after my crew was stolen from Earth. Coran's been trying to help me pull myself back together."

That softening again. "He's good at that," she murmured. "He showed me the archive... The twins were good friends of mine. He thought their albums would be a more gentle re-introduction to history before I go prowling the official records." Illyere sighed and made an odd motion with her hands and the bands on her wrists made the tube float up and back into its space on the shelves.

"That's a cool trick. How come mine don't do that?"

"Apparently I still have archivist's clearance," she said with the faintest of little smiles. "I can shelve a whole case in one go."

"Well, see? Obviously someone still thought of this as your home, if they kept you on the roles all this time," Shiro pointed out. "I bet there are other things in the castle that remember you like that. And... Allura and Coran obviously want this to be your home again."

"...True," she admitted softly, staring at seemingly nothing on the floor. "That's... very true... I suppose." Then she raised her head again, and her eyes had brightened, as if actually seeing him for the first time. "I'm sorry, I never actually asked your name."

"Just Shiro is fine," he said with a grin, offering his real hand. 

She smiled and accepted, then covered a sharp-fanged yawn. "If you don't mind... I think I'm just going to catch a few cycles' sleep here. I feel tired all of a sudden... not sure why."

"Take all the time you need, um, Ma'am," Shiro replied, still not quite able to bring himself to call a  _queen_ by name, even if she wasn't queen anymore. He got up and went searching through the studio archive's closets for a blanket, and when he returned, it was to the sight of the older woman curled up barefoot on the couch.

"Good job, lad."

Shiro jumped with a hiss of surprise, then turned to find Coran in the doorway. "Geez. Ah- what did I do?"

"Well, you got her to sleep, for one," the older man said as he approached, and Shiro handed him the blanket. "I was beginning to worry she was suffering after-coma-insomnia."

"That's a thing?"

"Unfortunately. How did you do it?"

"Well..." Shiro fidgeted awkwardly. "I think... she just needed someone who wasn't you or Allura to remind her that she belongs here, maybe? No offense, but you two aren't the most objective sources."

"None taken. She always had a hard time listening to Alfor and I about that back in the old days," Coran said, carefully arranging the blanket over the sleeping queen. "Maybe it'll be a little easier now with an outside perspective, hm?" he added as he took a seat beside her, gently brushing a hand over long purple curls.

"Yeah," Shiro said, sinking back down into his squishy chair. 

Now that she didn't seem nearly so frightening... 

Maybe they'd have a lot to talk about, too.


	21. Reciprocal

His head was pounding, hot and sick, in time with his racing heart as he stared at the bodies on the ground.

He’d only been separated from the group for-

for-

Bile rose up in the back of his throat, and he forced it back down, trying to stay on his feet as the swimming feeling in his skull threatened to make him collapse.

And then he heard that _laugh…_

 _“You,”_ he rasped as the hated illusion appeared, standing over Coran’s still, bloody form, some sort of twisted sword in hand. 

“Miss me?” the druid with his face taunted, casually leaning on the sword to drive it deeper into the dead Altean’s body. “I know _he_ did. They _all_ missed _you.”_

The sick feeling in his head grew along with his despair, and his knees felt weak under him, starting to buckle.

“-ro? Shiro!”

Shiro blinked in a confused daze and raised his head. That sounded like… Coran’s voice? But-

_“Shiro!”_

His double’s face twisted into a snarl and it drew back the sword, shifting into a position to lunge. Shiro swallowed, tasting the sour sick in his throat again, and tried to keep his balance. He was _sure_ this time he’d heard-

“-ot -eal -cus, Shiro!”

“Coran… Coran, I _can’t_ -” He barely managed to dodge, the sword screeching as it clashed off his false arm. Gritting his teeth, he clenched his hand to activate Mirje’s knuckle spikes and swiped back on the re-swing, but met-

Nothing?

“It’s an emotion feeder! Block it out!”

This… none of this… Almost getting stabbed again, he managed to look back at the bodies of his team on the ground. They looked… faded somehow. Like old photographs. 

Old memories.

Old _nightmares._

His jaw tightened, and as his doppleganger swung the sword at him again, he closed his eyes tightly and stood stock still.

When he opened them again, he found Coran, battered and bleeding, but _alive_ , struggling to hold some kind of creepy-looking bioluminescent salamander… _thing_ pinned to the ground. “Hello,” the Altean said, clearly exhausted. “Am I glad to see you _you_  again.”

“What is _that_?” Shiro asked, confused and more than a little disgusted as Coran released his captive and it scuttled away through the marsh into the darkness.

“Kumali Rema.” Coran gratefully accepted a hand up, and Shiro quickly wrapped an arm around his waist to prop him up. “They use illusions to feed on fear and despair until the target’s heart gives out, then they eat the body for dessert. Denpulla royalty used to capture them to use for assassinations.”

Shiro made a horrified noise and held Coran tighter. “God. I owe you one.”

“Nonsense. All a day’s work,” Coran said, but it was clear that despite his attempt at levity, the thing had given him a hell of a fight. He was favoring the mechanical leg.

“At least let me do the medical check this time,” Shiro said quietly. “You’ve done it so many times for me.”

Coran looked for a moment like he might protest, then relaxed. “All right. I suppose we can change up protocol just this once.”

-

“-the third time this _week,_ Shiro!”

He winced a little as Coran tied off the bandage patch with more force than necessary. Okay, yes, he’d been cutting it a tiny bit closer than usual in their last few fights, but it wasn’t as though he’d been throwing himself out on suicidal charges or risking their missions. 

So what was his _deal?_

As Coran turned to begin putting away the medical supplies, Shiro noticed something different peeking out from the sleeveless edges of the older man’s undersuit: small knicks that marred the glowing markings on his shoulders. 

He was sure he hadn’t seen _those_ during their spars earlier in the week. Not before-

Curious, he reached out and lightly tugged at the neckline of Coran’s undersuit, ignoring the Altean’s surprised squawk-

then sucked in a sharp breath.

Four jagged lines just below the jut of where neck met spine crossed Coran’s back over his shoulderblades. 

Four new scars.

Four _very_ new scars.

“Coran… _how_ did I not-” Shiro breathed, then realization hit him like lightning. “You... you shapeshifted to hide the injury when we were on Denpulla.” 

“They were _hardly_ life-threatening,” Coran protested, attempting to pull his clothing free. “You were in much worse shape from having that _thing_ in your head. Illyere was able to fix me right up as soon as we were aboard, no cryo required.”

“But-” And then it made sense why Coran had been fussing over him so much lately. That godforsaken mind lizard. He’d still been afraid of what it had done to him. Whether it was still having an affect.

Shiro felt dizzy all of a sudden, staring at those scars. Coran had gone and gotten himself hurt like _that_ for _him,_ and then had the gall to still _worry_ about him. It was-

Impulse took over, and before he could think about what he was doing, he tilted his head down, brushing the barest kiss against the highest scar, right at the base of Coran’s neck.

But when Coran flinched, startled, it was enough to snap him back into his own head.

Where he realized what he’d just done.

And… shit.

“Hell.” He quickly let go of the other man’s shirt, very aware of just _how_ many boundaries he’d just crossed. “I’m sorry, I-”

“Shiro-”

He fled.

-

He was aware he'd been avoiding Coran for the last three days. 

Everyone was aware of it.

He'd taken to spending time with the Queen as much as possible, since, of all people, Illyere seemed to be the only one who  _wasn't_ giving him the suspicious stink-eye every five minutes. Thankfully, she didn't seem to mind, neither the company, nor why he might be ducking out on Coran -"Red's personal life is only my business when I get to tease him about it," she'd said with a surprisingly impish grin- and had taken to teaching him more about how to use the archives.

"Okay, so, like... this?" he asked, making a sort of double helix motion with his hands. Shakily, the tubes he'd selected lifted up, then slotted back into their places on the shelves.

"Well done," Illyere replied with a nod. "I'll make an archivist of you yet."

Shiro grinned. "I never really thought of organization as soothing, but it's different when it's almost like you're doing magic."

"Indeed, getting to make things act on command does help," she agreed, then looked over his shoulder. "Hello, Red."

Shiro stiffened, his heart leaping into his throat. He hadn't heard the library doors open, but when he turned, Coran was indeed standing there, Thatchia on his shoulder. He swallowed through a suddenly painful throat, not really hearing what was said between the two Alteans for the warning hum that had suddenly started up in the back of his head.

"-then I'll leave you to it," Illyere said, sweeping past him to scoop Thatchia off Coran's shoulder as she headed for the door, jolting Shiro back to reality.

Wait, what?  _Don't leave me here!_ he wanted to yell after her, but she was already gone, and it was only him and Coran standing in awkward silence in the library.

"Well, then-" Coran started to say-

"I'm sorry," Shiro blurted out. When the older man blinked at him, he kept going in a rush, unable to make the words  _stop_. "I... I know I crossed a line, and I didn't mean to, but that doesn't excuse it. I'd been thinking about it for so long, and that actually makes it  _worse,_ and I just... I'm sorry," he finished lamely, rubbing the back of his neck. "I'll understand any reprimand you have ready."

 _"Reprimand?"_ Coran asked, sounding surprised, and when Shiro got the nerve to actually  _look_ at him, he seemed somewhat offended by the very thought. "Shiro, I didn't come here for anything of the sort. I just wanted to know  _why_ _._ "

He bit his lip. "It was... It's so hard to explain... I can't even put it all together in my head, let alone  _words,_ it's- it's the way everything feels when we spar, it's the way your hands feel when you do maintenance on my arm, the fact that you trust me to learn so much, to see the scars... all the talks at night, all the times you've kept me from falling apart, I- I just... there's so  _much_."

"Oh..." Coran murmured, looking away, and Shiro felt a nervous, uncertain fear welling up in his chest. "Oh my... I was only talking about the incident, but you... This is something much more, isn't it?"

Shiro clasped his hands behind his back, trying to hide the fact that they were shaking. "Yes...sir," he mumbled as he stared at the floor, unsure how to address the older man now that they were treading out into very dangerous territory.

"Shiro, surely someone of your age and caliber can do better than a has-been guard."

He raised his head, and Coran was still staring at the shelves, expression unreadable. 

No... not unreadable.

With some extra scrutiny, he could see the faint lines of disdain, not towards him, but inward.

Shiro swallowed, then straightened, keeping his voice low and steady. "Didn't you hear anything I said?" he asked, more a plea than a condemnation. "I don't  _want_ anyone else; I-" He faltered, breath hitching in his chest, then he hesitantly reached out and took hold of a gloved hand. "I'm not asking for a public declaration, or romantic dinners. What we already had going was better than I could have asked for. But... couldn't we try?"

Coran tilted his head to regard him, and the expression on his face made something warm flutter in Shiro's chest. Then he reached up with his other hand and lightly brushed the back of his fingers across Shiro's cheekbone in a way that made him feel pleasantly dizzy. "Alright," he said, smile soft and fond, and Shiro could have melted then and there. "We can try."


	22. Recompense

“Maybe… maybe we _don’t_ give these to Allura and the Queen,” Hunk was whispering to Pidge behind him, and Shiro, mildly horrified, could only nod.

They’d jokingly wondered on occasion what kind of drunk Coran might make. A flirt, a happy drunk, or the kind that spouted endless useless facts usually won.

A bar-trashing _rage_ drunk?

Never even touched the radar.

And yet- Lance dove for the ground as a pirate three times his size went flying through the window and missed him by inches, smashing into the wall of the alley with enough force to leave an imprint of his body grease as he slumped to the ground, unconscious. “ _Holy shit,”_ the Blue Paladin mouthed to Shiro from under the protection of his arms before ducking behind a barrel, the other three following suit and taking cover where they could find it.

That just left him.

Alone.

To try and calm a sloshed Altean that had already taken out half of the most vicious dive bar on the planet. 

“Well, it was an honor serving with you all,” he said, before putting on his helmet and wading in. 

The sight that met him looked more like a battlefield than a bar. Out cold or groaning bodies lay or dangled from trashed pieces of furniture in varying states of broken or bloody, and in the middle of it all, Coran was facing off with a _Thing_ that had longer teeth than limbs.

And _winning,_ from the looks of it. “Jesus Christ,” Shiro breathed as suddenly the teeth that Coran had a grip on snapped loose, causing the Thing to go tumbling into a sobbing heap.

And then Coran turned on _him,_ and Shiro involuntarily activated his arm, because sweet _fuck,_ those were very much _not_ the eyes of a drunk, those were the eyes of someone intent on _murder. “Coran_ ,” he warned, starting to shift into a defensive position. “It’s me. It’s Shiro. You _know_ me.”

Oh hell, those teeth and claws were sharp. And were those… _spikes_ going up his arms? Coran snorted like a bull on the attack and started to approach, and Shiro backed up. “Coran, snap out of it, whatever was in those jellies, this _isn’t you_.”

The _demon_ wearing Coran’s face only snarled before lunging at him, and Shiro threw up his shield-

Before an answering snarl and a blur of purple hair streaked into his vision, catching Coran on the leap and using his momentum to throw him aside.

“Shiro!” A hand grabbed his arm, and he looked back to find Allura. “Come on!”

“But Coran!”

“Mother will wear him down, leave them to it!”

He blinked, then looked back to find the two squaring off like enraged lions, fangs and claws bared. Deciding he very much did _not_ want to get in the middle of that, he obeyed the princess and followed her back out into the street, where the others had gathered at the door, the jellies that had started the whole mess in hand. 

“Do you have any idea what the _hell_ is going on?” Keith asked.

“Yeah, we just thought they’d be a nice snack for everybody. Then Coran tried one, and five minutes later, Berserk City!”

Allura frowned and picked one up, then they all cringed at the crash from inside the bar and quickly moved further away from the door. “Hmn… Hang on…” she muttered, activating a scanner to run an ingredients test. “No… no… no… Oh, quiznak.”

“Quiznak? What’s quiznak?” Hunk asked in alarm.

“Kuriakan Spores! Old Alteans used to make a beer from them that they’d drink before going to war, to get their battle lust going.”

“Well… Shit. What do we do _now?”_

“Nothing we _can_ do, except hope he and Mother don’t kill each other or bring the building down before they burn out of his system. How long has he been affected?”

“About half a cycle?”

“Time’s on our side, then. As many bodies as were in there, this shouldn’t take-” A weak groan behind them made them all jump, and they turned to find a bloody and battered Queen and Retainer stumbling from the building, barely holding each other up. “Mother! Coran!”

“Hnnnn, not so _loud,”_ Coran moaned. “What happened?”

“Uh, we may have accidentally dosed you with ancient bloodlust drugs,” Hunk said sheepishly, holding up the bag. “Sorry.”

“Oh, is _that_ all? Sweet stardust,” he said, seemingly noticing the carnage for the first time. “Did we both do that?”

“Oh most of it’s yours,” Illyere said cheerily, patting him on the back. “They just brought me in as a ringer.”

“At least now we know never to take you drinking,” Pidge said, eyeing a possibly dead pirate dubiously.

Coran elbowed the Queen when she started laughing, but even a hiss of pain when he hit bruise didn’t make her stop. “What’s funny?” Keith asked suspiciously

“You thought _this_ was his normal drunk state, that’s cute.”

“You mean it’s _not?”_  Shiro asked, then remembered what Allura said about the spores being battle specific. “Then what is?”

“Oh, you’ll have to find out.”

“For the love of Pellsnar, don’t _encourage_ them.”

Hunk grinned. "Now I  _really_ wanna find out. Uh, somewhere far away from here."

"Ditto."

"Me, too."

Coran groaned quietly, and Shiro just bit his lip to hide his smile, going to support his other side.

-

Sighing, Shiro scratched the back of his head.

He was just going to have to accept it.

He was _not_ a cook.

He made a small grumble in frustration as he prepared to dump his third attempt down the waste vaporizer chutes, when a small chirrup by his ankle reminded him he had another trash disposal at hand. Then he thought better of it. “No, Thatchia. I have no idea if you can even _get_ food poisoning, but I’m not risking it just to soothe my ego. Here,” he said, handing her some of the raw ingredients instead and watching the mess he’d concocted get atomized.

The doors swished and Illyere swept in, attention on a datapad’s holo, at least until her nose wrinkled, making her look up. “What in-”

“Sorry.”

Glowing green and pink eyes swept over the ingredients, cataloging. “Thulen Spice Rolls?” she guessed.

“There was… an attempt.”

“Oh, sweetheart, no, no, _no,”_ she chided, snapping the holo back into its tube. “You’ve bitten into a bone _way_ too hard for your teeth. Chefs _centuries_ skilled can’t make those.”

Shiro blinked in surprise, then pulled back up the recipe he’d been looking at. “But… they look so easy.”

“Deception in a bread puff,” Illyere replied, beginning to tie back the flows of her hair into a heavy bun. “We’ll try something much more simple. A substitution of my Amai’s Uquorran Shell Stew.”

“We?” Shiro asked, a slow smile beginning to cross his face as he watched her tie up the wide sleeves of her gown. 

Her own smile turned a touch sharp. “This is something special, isn’t it? For some _one_ special?” she asked, a teasing lilt in her voice.

His face beginning to go hot, he ducked his head rather than have to answer. Even though Coran had warned him up front that the Queen was relentless when it came to picking on those she’d taken close to heart, actually seeing this side of the woman who’d scared the hell out of him just weeks ago was definitely going to take some getting used to. Still, he’d take whatever professional help he could get without going to get grilled by Hunk, so when she started directing him on getting the pot and stove going, he hopped to it.

“Tret'chai, these little nimbs have almost no meat in them. We will have to use them all. At least their shells will work.”

“The shells are edible?” Illyere took one off the pan and popped it in his mouth, and once he got past the surprise… huh. Kind of like soft-shell crab. “Not bad.”

“Something bigger and choppable would be better. The ones on Amai’s homeworld were the size of your head.”

“Geez… So… your Amai was the non-Altean?” Shiro asked as he sliced mushroom-like little objects to put in the stew.

“Mm. Through my Father. My youngest brother and I took after him the most. My little sisters took more after Mother.”

He was still curious, but he had a feeling that would be stepping on lines not ready to be crossed yet, so he dropped the subject and continued chopping vegetables. “Has Coran had this stuff before?” he asked, since, well, the secret _was_ out.

“It’s one of his favorites from that world. His _absolute_ favorite were the roasted puo’ke’lum wings, but… we couldn’t substitute for those if we tried.”

He winced slightly at the tone in her voice. Just one more thing lost under the claws of the Empire, it seemed. Biting the inside of his cheek, he dumped the veggies into the boiling pot as Illyere began adding some sort of cream and a bowl of spices she’d already blended up, test-tasting as she went. 

“Almost… It still needs… something. A little more bitter.”

Shiro pursed his lips in thought, then went back to poke through the cabinets until he found a vial he’d run across earlier. It smelled vaguely vinegary, sort of peppery, and he handed it over for examination, beaming when she gave him a solid nod of approval.

“Perfect,” she said as the stew changed to a soft lavender color, then she got down a covered dish for him. “Now go stun him,” she said with a wink, making him blush all over again.

—

It became a game as he and Thatchia headed for the Old Paladin’s hall, him leaving bits from the extra bread loaf for her to snaffle up as she followed him, so she wouldn’t beg for for the stew. Balancing the tray on his hip, he knocked on the doorway of the old lab.

Coran looked up from where he was giving Smooshy his weekly maintenance. “Oh, hello. Dinnertime already?”

“Yeah. I figured it’d just be easier on both of us to eat down here, if that’s okay with you,” Shiro said brightly, laying the tray on one of the tables after pushing aside some odds and ends.

“Sounds excellent to me. I’d rather not leave the old boy opened up for too-” Shiro had uncovered the dish while Coran approached, and he had to bite his lip not to grin at the way the older man froze at the familiar-not-familiar smell. “Where in sheraiz did you get hold of uquorran shell stew?”

“Well, it’s not _quite_ the same thing, but Queen Illyere taught me how to make something close to it. A sort of... apology for the battle fever jellies, even though that was kind of _all_ of our faults. Want to try some?”

“Glories _yes,”_ Coran said eagerly, accepting the spoon and empty bowl Shiro held out and sitting down at the table, and Shiro took his own chair, heart fluttering giddily in his chest as he got ready to dish out his own portion.

Looked like he was going to have to ask the Queen for more cooking lessons.


	23. Reconnaissance

This was a bad idea.

This was the absolute _worst_ idea.

And yet here he was, in full Galra armor, with only a hood and voice synthesized mask to hide his identity and a Galra spy and a shapeshifted Coran to watch his back as he skulked through the _goddamned flagship of the Galra fleet._

A hand pressed to his back, and he jumped slightly. “Breathe, lad,” Coran murmured in a deep moderated growl, leaning down to his ear, and Shiro swallowed hard, hands clenching and unclenching as he tried to get his stuttering breath back under control.

Their contact, Thace, gave him a concerned look and reached out to gently clasp his other shoulder. “All will be well,” he promised softly. “We just have to get inside the lab, and then we’ll be safe.”

“You’re absolutely _sure_ they’ll let us in?” Coran asked. 

“You have something of interest to these two. They’ll want a close-up look.”

“So you’ve been saying,” Shiro managed, then quickly bit the inside of his cheek to shut up when the lift doors opened. Thankfully, Coran kept that subtle, reassuring hand on his back as they stepped out into the hall, because there were _so many sentry droids…_

Thace guided them through the maze of hallways to a set of sealed blast doors with a shuttered viewport window next to them and tapped a code into the lighted panel between the two. For a moment, nothing happened, and then the shutters snapped up and a scruffy-looking small Galra female in focus goggles appeared behind the glowing barrier, dangling upside down from something above.

“Yeah, wha- Oh. It’s _you,”_ she muttered, sounding put out at seeing Thace. “What does Her Hooded Snootiness want _this_ ti-”

Her gaze slid over him and Coran as she talked, and Shiro stiffened when her eyes locked on his arm and went huge.

“ _Holy grop!”_ she yelped, losing her balance and falling out of view with a crash. Before any of them could ask if she was okay -or _dead,_ considering the unprotected fall- the viewport barrier deactivated and a purple blur _vaulted_ out the window, grabbing onto Shiro’s arm.

Panic lanced through him, and on reflex, he started to activate the combat measures, before his brain processed what was actually happening-

“-geometric korifilament lighting and orthili-treated carbon steel panels could only be Yulnadae tech! Is it pure?!”

Very, very confused, Shiro stared down at the pint-sized Galra and blinked, then slowly realized exactly _why_ Thace had been so sure these scientists would be interested in him. “Er… not... not exactly? My friend here-” he indicated Coran, who’d apparently barely kept him from taking off the scientist’s head before he could get himself together, judging by the grip on his upper arm- “put it together with some Orichian parts.”

“ _Ooooh.”_ If she’d had a tail, he was sure it would be wagging. “But is there any _Galra_ tech in it?”

“None,” Coran said. “I removed everything of the original make.”

“ _Oh,_ then it _is_ pure! Oh, Sis is gonna blow a _proton coupling_ when she sees it! Come in, _come in!”_

They both looked at Thace, who merely tilted in his head as if to say ‘told you,’ and indicated for them to follow as their… _host_ opened the blast doors and bolted back inside at an all-fours clip.

The laboratory actually reminded him of a much messier version of the Old Paladins’ lab, and he could imagine the two Paladins working in this much chaos when they’d been around. Bits and pieces of projects in progress were scattered about, as were… _things_ floating in large glowing tubes that they were very careful to keep clear of.

“You can remove your disguises here if you wish,” Thace said, laying an object that he’d pulled out of his uniform down on a lab table.

“You’re sure?”

“No cameras are allowed within the requisitions lab anymore. It’s no longer cost efficient,” their guide said with a wry expression, and Coran made a light snort.

“You mean they don’t last very long,” he replied, not yet releasing his transformation.

“I heard that,” a new voice said, and the short Galra returned, trailed by a taller female with more elaborate facial markings and long hair pulled up in a bun. “And it’s not _our_ fault if the security department doesn’t want to upgrade their surveillance droids to a hardier-”

Shiro sidled towards the thing Thace had put on the table, trying to get a better look at it. The darkened eyes of mask didn’t allow for much, so he attempted to slide it to the side without actually uncovering his identity.

When he glanced up and realized the short one was staring at him, ears perked forward, he realized he’d made a very serious mistake.

What he _wasn’t_ expecting, however, was to nearly get knocked off his feet by a crushing hug around the waist. “Junk Arm!” the tiny Galra crowed. “You came back!”

All three of the others were staring when he regained his footing, and the looks on Thace and Coran’s faces would have been funny if he weren’t just as confused as they were.  _“Junk Arm?”_

“Ylva came up with the name during that hackneyed rush-job Old Scarface had us build for your grafting. Worst piece of grop I’m ever ashamed to call my work,” the older female said, her nose wrinkled in disgust as she folded her arms. 

That made… an unfortunate amount of sense, given some of the problems he’d had with it, but still-

“Wait… hold on…” Coran said, cutting into the conversation. “You two built Shiro’s arm _badly?_ But…  _why?”_ he asked, voicing the same question echoing in Shiro’s head.

“Because the old barchak didn’t give us any _time!”_ Ylva protested as she let go of Shiro. “We kept _telling her_ -”

“ _Repeatedly_.”

“-that it was going to take some _doing_ to make the tech of the suit he was captured in compatible with Galra mechanics, but every time we _did_ -”

“She would get all ‘Mere _science_ does not a Champion make. Just get it functional and _we_ will handle the rest’,” the elder finished in a near-perfect imitation of Haggar’s rasp and arrogant tilt of the head, as Ylva gagged and Thace snorted in amusement.

“That does sound like something she’d say,” he said dryly.

“We were lucky the damn thing didn’t infect you with metal poisoning, or, Shrikemi forbid, Chakru-node overload. You would have been dead on the table if _that_ had happened, and there’s no telling what they would have done with you then.”

“You make it sound like being dead isn’t the worst thing that could happen,” Shiro said.

The looks the three Galra gave him were answer enough, and he fought down a sudden sour rise of bile in the back of his throat. Thankfully, Coran caught the drain of color in his face and moved to support him before his legs could buckle.

“Um… so…” the older one said, hesitantly scratching behind her ear. “Obviously you’re _not_ here on errand duty for Scarface. So what _are_ you here for?”

“A trade,” Thace said, picking up what he’d brought. “Our… ‘guests’, need an assessment of the weaponry the elder has recovered, and you two are currently the only ones capable of dealing with the tech involved.”

“Flattery gets you everywhere,” she teased. “Let’s see it.”

The smaller one whistled as Thace handed it over.  “Rekuli parts, haven't seen those in awhile," she said, squinting through one of the focus lenses

"Looks like some Metripikan power cores. And are those Umorna etchings? Ooh, this is is going to be _fun.”_

“And that’s why he recommended you,” Coran said, his voice sounding slightly distant. 

Shiro glanced over at him, trying to read his expression, but his partner was watching the pair of Galra scientists with a blank look. “What are you planning?”

“Not sure, yet. Need to confirm a few things, first. Thace, could you come here, please? I have a few questions for you.”

“Does something trouble you?” their guide asked, leaving the two to dig into machinery with gusto.

“Not troubled, just curious. You told us before we came here that these two were requisition and retrofitting engineers, correct? How many are there in the corps?”

“Few. The job of making conquered tech Empire-compatible is complex and dangerous enough that it has to be taught master to apprentice, and the master to these two was swept up in the last dissident purge. They are too young to take on apprentices of their own, so they are currently the best we have.”

Coran’s smile was sharp, calculating. “I was hoping you’d say something like that,” he said, before dropping his disguise illusion.

Both females looked up at the transformation ripple, then nearly hit the ceiling in surprise. “ _Shekai!”_ the elder half-shrieked as the smaller clung to her, fur puffing out in all directions. “You’re one of the ones in the transmissions! Thace, what have you-!”

“Calm down,” Thace said, catching them both by the collars before they could bolt for the upper lab balconies. “They’re not here to attack you.”

“Indeed. In fact, I have another offer for you,” Coran said, bowing lightly.

“What kind of offer?” Ylva asked, tone suspicious, but ears pricked forward.

“I am one of the last Alteans, I’m sure you realize what that means,” Coran said, and judging by the way two pairs of gold eyes went wide, that was a yes. “I came here from an Altean ship. And not just _any_ Altean ship, but the very royal castle itself. If you would be willing to give us further aid in weapons construction and smuggling of technology, I would be willing to let you explore the areas that have been Altean-built.”

Shiro’s jaw dropped. That… was _brilliant._ Not only did it appeal to the base natures of their hosts, but by stipulating the builders, Coran could keep them out of the Old Paladins’ lab. But he was sure there had to be something else… Something behind that glint in the older man’s eye as Thace dropped the two scientists and returned to them, and the two females began a heated whispered discussion in Galra hissing. “You’ve still got something up your sleeve.”

“Allura won’t be happy with me about bringing them aboard,” Coran admitted. “But she might forgive me when she finds out we’re stealing two of the Empire’s best and brightest.”

“ _Stealing-_ oh, that’s _sneaky_. I’m impressed.”

Coran just smiled again and clasped his hands behind his back as the two Galra turned to them, beaming.

“You got a _deal!”_


	24. Radicalise

“Huh. Odd.”

“What’s odd?” Coran asked, keeping his voice low as he, Thace, and Shiro kept the sisters hidden from view by way of a wall of their bodies.

“None of the security codes have been changed,” Aldri said, fingers flying over the touchscreens. “You’d think losing two of their main project scientists, even so recently, would be some cause for concern.”

“That could mean one of three things,” Thace replied. “Either they haven’t figured out you’re missing yet-”

“Oh, now I’m insulted,” Ylva muttered.

“-they genuinely didn’t expect someone to try and come for the Triad, or this is a trap.”

“We’ll have to hope for A or B,” Shiro said under his voice synthesizer.

“Okay, the barriers to the lower lab are down and the cameras have been disabled. Let’s go steal a robo-egg.”

Once they’d actually gotten a look at it, Shiro could see that ‘robo-egg’ had been no joke. The ovaloid droid floated in an energy harness, waiting for activation. Sleek, solid black and lifeless, it was hard to tell what tech had been put into it.

“Keep an eye out,” Ylva called. “We’re gonna try to reprogram the harness to shuttle mode.”

“On it,” Shiro replied, moving close to the doors so he could see out the port windows. 

They’d all been playing lookout for roughly five minutes when he heard Aldri curse vividly in Galran. “What’s wrong?” Coran asked from another door.

“Someone just put in an activation order with a command code! They can’t activate it today! It’s not ready!”

Shit. _Shit._ Either they had the worst luck ever and the Galran higher ups were demanding idiots, which was entirely possible, or they’d been caught, which was also likely _. “Everybody hide!”_

_—_

His back was beginning to cramp badly, but he didn’t dare move. There were scientists and soldiers bustling and complaining all over the lab, and so much as a sneeze was probably going to get him busted. 

He winced at the sudden bright flash as the activation sequence began. 

This was bad.

<< _Who’s there?! >>_

This was worse.

He swore under his breath as a soldier dragged the disguised Coran out of his hiding place, ready to beat him over the head with the butt of his rifle-

-and then everything in the room seemed to slow to a halt as the ‘eye’ of the robo-egg opened in response to an input command, and fired a bright purple beam that encased the transformed Altean, rather than the infocron one of the scientists had been holding.

Panic washed over Shiro and he bolted from his spot to try to get to Coran. As he did so, the shock that had frozen the room erupted into chaos. The solder went to grab Coran, only to be shot by- 

-the droid? Why the hell had-?

Shiro blinked in surprise and was nearly plowed over by a panicked scientist before he recovered and ran to his partner. “Are you okay?”

“Surprisingly, yes. Is it _supposed_ to do that?” Coran asked Aldri, who’d appeared beside them in the melee. 

“No, but it also isn't _finished_. There's no telling what kind of kludged together programming it's acting on at this point. Let’s get out of here before we find out the hard way!” 

Using the maelstrom of activity to their advantage, the five of them made for their exit.

And it was only after the door exploded after them that they realized the droid was _following_.

—

“And that’s how we ended up bringing a Galran superweapon home with us,” Shiro explained as Triad and Smooshy tweedled and beeped at each other, apparently figuring out what their mutual language was going to be.

The other Paladins, plus Princess and Queen, just stared at him.


	25. Ransom

He woke to a roaring in his ears, and when his head reoriented enough to realize what it was, his stomach sank all the way into his shoes.

One of the last sounds he’d ever wanted to hear again.

Inhaling sharp gulps of air in an attempt to keep himself from throwing up all over the cell floor, Shiro hunched himself into a ball, resting his forehead against the cold metal until he could get himself under control.

At least they hadn’t taken his armor and stuffed him back in prison rags. _Why_ they’d granted him such a courtesy, he was afraid to find out.

Shit, if he  _ever_ found that backstabbing Loijeera again, he was going to strangle the slithery little weasel with his bare-

“On your feet, _Paladin,”_ a guard’s voice sneered. “You’re up.”

“I won’t,” Shiro spat coldly, retreating away from the door. “Not for you bastards. Never again.”

“Oh, you will,” replied number two on the list of voices he hated the most. “Unless you want your mission partner to suffer the consequences.”

Mission- “ _What did you do with Coran?!”_

 _That goddamned sneer- “_ You’ll find out soon enough. Out. Now.”

Gritting his teeth, Shiro forced down a wave of rage and clenched his hands behind his back to keep from reflexively lunging for her throat when the door opened. 

—

The lights were no less dizzying than they’d been when he’d been in the ring last, and the bloodthirsty roar of the crowd made his head throb.

Shiro took a deep breath, willing it down. Get this over with, get out, get to Coran. Somehow. He’d have to play it by ear, but he’d manage.

“We have a _special_ match on the docket this cycle!” the announcer crowed, rows of teeth flashing in several malicious grins. “Who will prevail in a head to head match to the death? The Black Paladin of Voltron? Or the Last Royal Guard of Altea?”

_No._

Shiro took a step back and whirled on where Haggar had been, but as always, the Druid leader had vanished.

_No!_

_“Future against Past, which will survive?”  
_

The gateway across from him opened, and Shiro felt his heart go cold at the blank eyed, glowing purple stare that met him before Coran saluted with one of the swords he carried.

“ _BEGIN!”_

_—_

In their spars, Coran could still kick his ass on a good day.

This was not a good day.

This was very much _not_ a good day. 

Shiro felt the impact all the way in his teeth as the energy blade of one sword screeched off his shield, barely evaded getting slashed in the throat by the second, then lunged to the left to avoid getting backed up against a pillar where he’d have no room to maneuver. 

He’d given up trying to get through to Coran verbally. No matter how much he hated the thought, his only chance was going to be to knock out the older man and think of something later.

If he could stay alive long enough to manage _that,_ he mentally amended as he barely blocked a stab at his face.

Think.

_Think._

Frantically, he kept his shield arm moving, protecting as best he could, while he looked around for something, _anything,_ that could put some distance between him and those flashing swords.

Then he saw the chain.

Someone apparently hadn’t done a good job of cleaning up from the last bout, but he wasn’t complaining. Diving away from his attacker, Shiro grabbed the cuff on the end and whipped the chain up and around one sword, then yanked, succeeding in dragging Coran close.

_*CRACK*_

He wasn’t sure how hard an Altean skull was. Hard enough to dent his helmet, that was for sure. But guilt still hit like a freight train when his partner dropped to the ground in a crumpled heap. He was going to owe Coran so many apologies for this hellscape of a mission when they made it back to the castle.

 _“The Paladin is victorious!”_ the announcer crowed over the roar of the crowd.  _“Now for the ceremony of final rite!”_

Shiro growled under his breath at the knife that appeared in front of him, instead crouching to carefully pick up his fallen companion.

Around them, the cheers began to turn to boos.

_“You can’t do that! Guards!”_

“Oh, get _bent!”_ Shiro snapped, grabbing the knife to fling it into the head of the first sentry that appeared at the gate. 

The crowd seemed to enjoy _that_. Maybe they didn’t care either way as long as _something_ got destroyed. Somehow, he wasn’t entirely surprised. 

Maybe he could use it to his advantage.

Shifting Coran so the man was leaning on him instead, he bent and snatched up the chain and sword, swinging it like a grappling hook, then flung it straight at the announcer’s hovering platform.

The explosion and roaring of the crowd made for an excellent cover as he fled through the still-open gate where the sentry had been.

—

He didn’t miss hiding in these tunnels.

Not one bit.

“Nnh.”

At the soft groan, he gently laid his burden down. “Coran? You with me?”

The flickering of purple light in the older man’s eyes worried him considerably. “Who’s… is someone… who’s there?”

“It’s me, Coran. It’s Shiro.” 

“Shiro?” the Altean asked, as if not quite comprehending the word as a name. The light dimmed, then flared, refusing to let go entirely.

Shiro bit his lip, willing back the sudden pain in his chest and the way his throat felt tight. “Just… just rest, alright? You’ve been through a lot. You’ll feel better after you sleep some more.”

At least he hoped so.

 _God,_ he hoped so.

—

His brain was itching, and Coran was occasionally mumbling in Altean as he slipped in and out of consciousness. 

No prizes for guessing who was hunting them, Shiro thought bitterly as he shifted the older man's weight. 

Just a little further.

Just a  _little_ further.

For the sake of entertainment, it seemed, the Galra hadn't stripped all of the emergency equipment out of his armor. He could still access his beacon, if they could just get far enough out of the city that it wouldn't be picked up by the air patrols instead. And then it would just be a matter of Black retrieving them and-

-and then what?

He looked over at Coran, at that hated unnatural light that _still_ leaked free when eyelids fluttered weakly. 

What if-

 _No,_ dammit.

He was going to recover.

Or they'd fix this. 

_Something._

_—_

"What do you  _mean_ Zarkon's witch did this to him?!"

Shiro involuntarily took a step back in the face of Allura's rage, and was only saved when Illyere stepped in, gently pulling her daughter back.

"Give him room to explain, sweetbug," the previous Queen chided, and Allura's hands clenched at her sides before she blew out a breath and nodded.

He'd called a full-crew alert as soon as they'd landed, and now eight worried faces and two concerned camera eyes were all watching him while Thatchia snuffled at the table Coran slept on. "Our contact concerning the base plans on Ikkamaru was a sell-out. They had almost a full platoon waiting for us as soon as we arrived."

"That piece of-"

"Not _now_ , Lance," Allura gritted, still clearly on edge.

Shiro swallowed thickly. "They threw us both back into the gladiator pits to fight each other. Apparently Haggar's idea," he added flatly. "She seemed to be calling the shots."

"And he's been like this since?" Illyere asked.

"Yes, Ma'am," Shiro mumbled. "I... um... I admit I did clock him to keep him from killing me, I don't know if that might have made it worse-"

"You stopped the fight, with neither life lost. As long as you're both here, this is still salvageable. Hm?" she asked, gently nudging her daughter.

Allura looked for a moment like she might disagree, and Shiro was reminded of a time in the past when Coran had been similarly angry with him over  _her_ safety. But then she seemed to just... _deflate_. "Indeed," she said, the tiniest of tremors in her voice. "We'll... we'll do what we can."

"So... what _do_  we do now?" Hunk asked quietly.

_—_

It had been Illyere who had sent Keith, Lance, and Hunk back out to some planet called Jekorya and the ruins located there, and ordered Pidge and their two Galra scientists to start digging through the Castle records for all relevant personnel files that could help them.

And then that had just left the three of them, and Coran. 

Coran, who had gone from more or less being the backbone of the crew to more or less being a puppet with its strings cut.

Shiro felt sick to his stomach as he watched Illyere gently show Coran how to handle a thermo-bottle of soup. Allura wandered into the archives, face still streaked from crying, and sat down beside him, and he hugged her around the shoulders. “We’ll get him back, one way or another,” he promised softly.

She just nodded. None of them could blame her for being a wreck, having essentially had her second father erased like this. Her mother motioned her over, and she finally perked up a little, pulling away to go assist.

Shiro didn’t know what he could do. He’d gathered all of the twins’ albums at Illyere’s request, but until Pidge and the Sisters finished their research, there wasn’t any use for them. Until Coran had regained basic function, none of the things they used to do together would be helpful. It was just…

“Shiro, could you come here, please?”

He blinked, surprised by the queen’s request. “S- sure. What do you need?”

“Would you please stay with him while he sleeps? Pidge needs our assistance in the records.”

Shiro hesitated. “Are… are you sure? Wouldn’t one of you be better to-” She raised an eyebrow, an expression that clearly told him not to question her logic, and he swallowed, knowing when to back down. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Thank you.”

Mother and daughter left hand in reassuring hand, and Shiro was left standing there, a snoozing Coran settled in one of the squishy chairs. He took a deep breath, then pulled another chair over and settled himself down, taking hold of the older man’s hand. Either Illyere or Allura had removed Coran’s gloves, and Shiro just ran his thumb over callouses and scars, counting to himself.

At least those were still there.

A soft chirp broke into his thoughts, and he raised his head to find a familiar puffball at the door. “Hey, girl. Come on in, he’s sleeping.”

Thatchia shuffled in and clambered up into his lap, huddling in close with a shiver of concern, and Shiro began scratching her ears with his other hand. “Yeah, we’re all worried about him, too,” he murmured. 

_—_

He didn’t remember dozing off, but when his comm beeping woke him, he found that at some point, Coran had shifted in his sleep, snuggling close against his side, head tucked into his shoulder.

Maybe that was a good sign?

Trying not to get his hopes up, he tapped his comm. “I’m here, what’s up?”

“Well, the defenses in this place were a much bigger pain in the ass than expected, but we found that weird glowy spring the Queen mentioned and collected as much as the reserves could hold,” Lance’s voice wheezed. “Bringing the water back in 0230.”

“Copy that,” Shiro said, heart starting to race. “We’ll meet you in the hanger.”

 _Maybe, maybe, maybe_  his heart sang as he commed the rest of the crew so they could help get Coran moved.

Maybe there was still a chance.

 


	26. Reconstruct

“How…exactly…does this work?”

“Well, one part science, one part inherent ability, and three parts, ah, _magic_ would be a good way of summing it up,” Illyere said as her claws delicately skimmed through the archive’s filing system. “I’ve done it before. Once.”

“That’s not exactly reassur- _ow_.” Keith cut off after Pidge sharply elbowed him in the stomach. Out of the corner of his eye, Shiro noticed them spoiling for an argument and subtly indicated the brittle expression on Allura’s face.

They both quickly settled.

“Well, _I_ may have only done it once, but the Jekoryans used it as a standard healing method," the former Queen clarified. "They believed in healing the soul along with the body. Hmmnh- ah, here we go.” She pulled out a chain of coding and ‘tossed’ it into the datapad Shiro held. “Shiro, you and Allura and Pidge go find this scroll and put together all the records we collected, please?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” he and Pidge both chorused, and Allura nodded weakly, accepting a reassuring hand-squeeze from her mother before following.

“Meet us in Sector Zutai-91-Xexi,” she called after them. “Alright, the rest of you, help Smooshy grab those water tanks you picked up…”

—

“Whoa,” Pidge murmured when the door swished open.

 _Whoa, indeed,_ Shiro silently agreed. Coran had been laid in an oblong glass tank on the floor that was filled with… _some_ kind of fluid that glowed a dim magenta color. The others had _called_ it water, and he was sure they weren’t just messing with him, but-

“Mother, what’s all this?”

Shiro shook himself out of the daze as Allura took the datapad out of his hand and went to crouch beside her mother while the latter was checking the rebreather that had been fitted over Coran’s mouth and nose.

“Part of the process, sweetbug. Did you lot have any trouble finding the instruction scrolls?”

“Right here.”

“Um… is there anything else you need the rest of us to do?” Hunk asked as he finished stacking the empty water tanks.

“Watch the medical monitors for us.” Illyere dried her hands on a towel and began reading down the holoscroll. “I can keep track of Allura and myself, but I’ll need one of you to interrupt if there are any unnatural spikes in Coran’s vitals while we’re doing this.”

“We? _Me?_ What am I going to be- wait, no,” Allura said when her mother looked up from the scroll. “Mother, I can’t- I haven’t learned enough- I haven’t _practiced-”_

 _“Breathe,_ dearheart.” Illyere gently squeezed Allura’s shoulder, and Shiro politely looked away to give them a bit of privacy. “It’s going to take more power than I have solo to charge the pool. You’re _ready_ for this, I promise. It’s just like meditating.”

He heard Allura inhale, a deep, harsh wheeze of air, then- “Alright.” And when he looked back, the princess seemed to be… _herself_ again, sharp and resolute.

“Pidge, Aldri, Ylva, hook up those terminals and start the record and memory feeds.”

“On it!”

He couldn’t _see_ anything different happening in the tank, but he could _feel_ it. A sort of humming against his skin that was almost like static feeling the air. And judging from the way Ylva's fur puffed up, Lance wrinkled his nose, and Hunk shuddered, he wasn’t the only one. “To our stations?” he asked. 

“On standby,” Illyere agreed. “Allura, you’re on that end of the tank,” she said, sitting at Coran’s head and putting her hands in the water near his ears. “Just remember, sweetbug. Like meditating.”

Allura swallowed and nodded, sitting at Coran's feet and mimicking her mother's pose.

The tank began to pulse with light.

Shiro softly sucked in a breath.

He’d seen the healing talent used before, on him even.

But this.

_This…_

Illyere and Allura’s markings glowed in time with the heartbeat of the tank, and something deep _inside_ them answered as well, deep and _bright_ and resonating out through their ribs and flesh.

“God _damn_ …” he heard Lance breathe, and he couldn’t form words to agree with the awed assessment of what they were seeing, just nodding instead. 

Then the instruments and monitor panels began to softly beep and ping and putter and reminded them all that they had a job to do if this was going to work.

And it _had_ to work.

—

He’d been happy to join in with the others planning the recovery party while Illyere and Allura finished up all of the checks and tests to ensure Coran was fully… _himself_  again _,_ but putting out table settings with Smooshy and listening to Lance and Ylva argue over which color decorations the replicators should spit out didn’t keep him from not-so-subtly glancing at his communicator every two minutes.

“Hey.” He started slightly, then looked up to find Aldri carrying two of the many huge trays of snacks Hunk had been making. “Deep breath, cub. You’ll be the first they call.”

Shiro was sure he was blushing down all the way to his toes. “Uh- I don’t- We’re not-”

The Galra scientist grinned, all sharp fangs. “Can’t fool _our_ senses, cub,” she teased as she slid one tray onto the table and oh, God, he just wanted to sink into the floor now. “But I gotcha. Hush, hush.”

“Thanks,” he managed, somehow, and she had the utter gall to  _wink_ at himbefore turning to put out the rest of the food he carried.

So this was what death by embarrassment was like. He'd thought it was bad when  _Allura_ had found out.

He was spared from any more mortification by a tinny little chime from his comm and held it up to his ear. “Yeah?”

“We’ve got him all pulled together if you’d like a bit before the others see him,” Allura’s voice piped up, and Aldri was _grinning_ at him, damn her.

“I don’t want to intrude-”

“We’ll have all the family time we need after the party,” Illyere’s voice promised. “Don’t you worry about us.”

“Okay, then.”

—

They’d gotten Coran all cleaned up and re-groomed. At first glance, it would have appeared that absolutely nothing had happened in the last week.

And then Shiro realized that not only were all his scars visible, but there were several new, tiny ones around his eyes.

As if something had _burned_ its way out there.

Swallowing thickly, he glanced back at Illyere, who gave him an encouraging nod, then took hold of the older man’s hand.

Coran blinked up at him tiredly, and he’d never been so happy to see _blue_ eyes in his entire life. “Hello,” Coran rasped tiredly, voice sounding it was pulled from somewhere deep and dark inside him. “Been awhile, hasn’t it?”

Shiro laughed weakly, feeling his eyes beginning to sting, and sank into the chair beside the bed, leaning forward to rest his forehead against his partner’s. “Feels like ages,” he murmured.

And it felt so good to just _stay there,_ like that, holding on to each other and breathing, knowing that, for now at least, everything was okay again.


	27. Rabid

They were just supposed to get in, restock food and Optrikanni power crystals for the Lions, and be on their way. 

That had been the plan.

And then the shadows had begun to move in a way that made their Detrichani guide  _extremely_ nervous, and Coran knew someone had set them up. “ _Shields up!”_

He yanked the Detrichani down before they could lose their head to a bolt of energy that erupted out of the dark of the tunnel and handed them one of his spare pistols to defend themselves, then quickly turned to keep from getting stabbed in the neck, a daggar screeching off his shield as he used it to throw the Druid back.

Why  _they_ would attack  _here,_ so far from the Galra main fleet, he didn’t know. But at the moment, he didn’t much  _care._ If they managed to capture one,  _then_ there would be time for interrogations, but the important thing  _now_ was staying alive. “Five, North Side!”

“Thanks!” Pidge called back after shooting her bayard over her shoulder and into the face of the Druid that had been trying to creep up on her. To her right, Lance cracked another across the mask with his, and Hunk had just flung a third down a crevice. That left-

“ _Allura, move!”_

The panic in both Shiro and Illyere’s voices made his blood turn to ice, and when he whipped around, everything seemed to move as if suspended in water as he saw the former queen shove her daughter out of the way of a massive boiling cloud of corrupted quintessence, only to take the blow square to the chest. His own heart seemed to stop as he watched her body fly back to hit the cave wall with a sickening  _crack_ and collapse into a heap-

_**“Mother!”** _

Time and his pulse started again, his heart pounding in his ears as Allura ran to her mother. Slowly, he turned his head to find where the attack had come from.

And he saw _red_.

—

Shiro felt his stomach drop into his toes when Illyere hit the ground. Instinctively, he ran over to see if he could render any kind of aid, but when he crouched beside the fallen former queen, Allura was already in defensive mode, hunched over her mother protectively. 

“Off!”

“Whoa, whoa! It’s me! It’s us!” he added as Pidge was the next to arrive.

“S- Shiro. I’m-”

“Easy. Look. Her body’s already trying to heal itself,” he said, and indeed, Illyere’s markings were weakly pulsing brighter. Though it wasn’t  _that_ reassuring, with how wrecked she still looked.

“I don’t… I don’t know what to do. We didn’t have  _time._ I never learned the advanced-”

“Maybe… maybe you can just boost her?” Pidge suggested. “Like when you two fixed Coran. If you give her more strength, maybe she can fix herself.”

Allura still looked unsure, but nodded, squaring herself up, and clutched her mother’s hands. Turning away, Shiro found the other team had assembled, except for- “Where’s Coran?”

“Um-” Hunk pointed in the direction of the fight they’d been in.

Shiro was instantly reminded of the rage jellies and the time he’d faced down a Coran set on nothing less than murder. Only this might actually have been  _worse._ Gone were the spikes Coran had grown when fighting drunken pirates, and in their place where a bright glow that seemed to seep through the veins of his arms and around his markings. _“Oh, shit,”_ he muttered quietly at the sight of his partner doing his damned best to tear his way through the Druids with his bare hands.

“Uh, yeah. What do we do?”

“Well, at this point?” Shiro lifted his bayard. “The best thing we can do is make sure he gets a clear shot at Haggar and _she_ doesn’t get a clear shot at _him_. And hope he doesn’t mistake  _us_ for the enemy.”

Pidge looked back at Allura and her mother. “What about-?”

“The fewer druids there are, the less danger they’re in. C’mon.”

—

When the hot, white buzz in his head finally faded, it was replaced by an uncomfortable dull throb of pain. Coran winced, rubbing at his eyes, then made a noise of disgust at how wet his gloves had been when they’d made contact with his face. “What in-”

“Uh… you back?”

He blinked and turned his head to find Hunk looking at him cautiously from over his shield. “Am I back? What in sheraiz is that supposed to-  _Illyere!”_

The former queen still lay in a heap, markings weakly pulsing as her body struggled to heal itself, when they approached. Her eyes were slitted open, but they were unfocused and had lost most of their glow, and worry clenched his heart as he crouched down. “How long has she been like this?”

“Um…” 

He barely noticed them all glancing at each other, the remainder of his attention taken up by how terrible Allura looked as she struggled to keep feeding power to her mother. “Nevermind. Too long. Your highness, you’ve got to cut off.”

“No.”

“ _Allura_ -”

“ _No._ She’s not strong enough to maintain on her own. If I stop now, she’ll-”

“If you  _don’t_ stop, you’ll  _both_ go, and she’d never forgive me if I let anything happen to you!” Coran snapped.

“She can’t not forgive you if she’s  _dead!_ Just let me-”

“Both of you, shut up. ‘S’too loud.”

The rasp was barely more than an exhale of air. And when he looked down, Illyere had closed her eyes. But he was sure he’d heard her speak. And, judging by the small snorts from the human gallery, he hadn’t been the only one. He sighed and stripped off a bloody glove, scrubbing his face with his bare hand. Ever the joker to the last. “ _Alright_. Alright. Just… see if you can get by with a weaker transfer or something,” he said, before beginning to input a series of codes on his comm band.

“What are we gonna do now?” Lance asked, picking at an empty Druid shroud with his bayard in disgust.

“I’m contacting Smooshy. We haven’t had to use one of the mobile cryo units since the Castle went live, so I have no idea what kind of condition they’re in, but it’s our only hope right now. While the Princess and I get Illyere prepped for loading, the rest of you look after our guide and see what you can find from what’s left of our shadowy friends there.”

“On it.”

—

Allura was seated by her mother’s cryo chamber and inhaling her seventh helping of Optrikanni Silverscale Stew with plenty more food waiting when Shiro came into the cryo room, a load of blankets under one arm and an open bottle of Borrakkhan Root Soda in the other hand.

“Mind if I join the vigil?” he asked, taking a seat on the floor, Thatchia shuffling in behind him.

“Sure, Uncle,” Allura said as she grinned a sharp-toothed grin over the rim of her bowl.

Coran had sort of expected it coming, but still choked on his own soda a little. Shiro, on the other hand, coughed bubbles an impressive distance, his eyebrows attempting to contort in opposite directions of his face as all colors fled from his skin. “Ex _cuse_ me?” he asked, his voice cracking an entire octave in just two words.

That was enough. Coran gave in to the tickle forming in his throat and started to laugh, Allura following in suit until she had to put the bowl down for fear of spilling. “I needed that,” she finally wheezed, wiping her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Don’t worry, it’s not going to be permanent.”

“Oh. Oh, thank _God_ ,” Shiro gasped, his voice still a little high and his face still a little ashen. “I can deal with the occasional joke, but… geez. _Warn_ a guy next time.”

Allura reached over and grabbed a bag of trutcha chips, ripping it open to dig out a handful. “Not if it gets that kind of reaction, I won’t,” she said impishly before stuffing them in her mouth. Then her expression saddened somewhat after she swallowed. “Mother would have loved to see it.”

Coran finished a swig of soda, then reached over to pat her on the back. “We’ll show her the castle security records after she wakes up,” he said reassuringly. “And I’m sure you’ll have thought of something else just as good by then.”

“They’re trying to kill me, you see that?” Shiro said to Thatchia. “Planning my death like it’s a family sport. To think I trust them.”

“Nyurr.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I agonized over whether to put this here or in Other Sides, because it's mostly Coran's POV. I ultimately decided it was too plot-important to put in the side-stories.)


	28. Rarity

“Nyrr.”

Shiro groaned quietly and rolled to his side on the couch, looking down at the kittekirri staring up at him. “Is whatever you want absolutely necessary?” he asked in a tired rasp, his arm flopping uselessly off the edge. 

The puffball responded by shuffling into his limp hand in a clear demand to be picked up.

Oh. 

Well.

He supposed he could dredge up the energy for that, and rolled back onto his back to settle Thatchia onto his chest, beginning to scratch her ears and enjoying the sound of her quiet purr.

Fuck, he was drained. 

Five days.

Five  _days_ of near-constant fighting, and all he wanted to do was  _sleep,_ but it was like his body had decided it was too exhausted to even do  _that._ He’d given up on his bed and come down to the archives, but even the comfortably familiar setting wasn’t helping much. Neither was the half-empty cana of fulial root brew going cold on the table above his head.

The doors swished open, and he didn’t bother to turn his head at familiar footsteps. “How goes?”

“Illyere’s still cozy in her cryo, all repairs have been made, and we still have no idea who’s in charge of that ship that keeps showing up at the Detrichani camps,” Coran said, somehow managing to  _flop_ gracefully onto the couch before reaching over to ruffle their pet. “On the plus side, the Detrichani have successfully evacuated their last hiding place and have put out a warning call among their network.”

“Good,” Shiro muttered, shifting his weight a bit so his head was settled against Coran’s hip. “Maybe that’ll give us at least a little leeway now.”

“Mhhmm.”

Thatchia’s purring grew louder in the silence that settled in the room, and Shiro closed his eyes as he relaxed a little more comfortably.

Sleep claimed him within minutes.

-

Shiro blinked, eyelids fluttering as he floated up out of the first long sleep he could remember in weeks.

Where…?

Oh, the archives, he noted absently as he became more aware of his surroundings, the soft, warm, rumbling weight of a napping Thatchia on his stomach. He must have dozed off reading again. Hadn't he? He didn't really suppose it mattered. Just that he'd finally gotten to  _sleep_ after the hellish week they'd all had.

Sleepy, drifting, and comfortable, he slowly became aware of other sensations around him. Like the fact that his pillow also seemed to be breathing. And the soft, gentle brushing of long -ungloved- fingers through his hair.

Grinning a little, he tilted his head back and nudged the datapad over his head aside. “Hey.”

“Oh, hello. Finally got some sleep, did you?” Coran asked casually, as if Shiro hadn’t just spent however many hours half-snuggled in his lap.

Shiro just made a tiny snort of amusement and tilted his head to lean further into the delicious scratching at his scalp. “Working on anything important right now?” 

“Not particularly. Maintenance orders, parts deliveries, keeping an eye on Illy, that sort of thing. Nothing that would require you to move any time soon, if you would like to rest a little longer.”

“Mm, maybe.” The hand in his hair drifted lower, brushing an ear, and he raised his own hand to catch it, lacing their fingers together as he pressed a soft kiss against the palm. “Might just stay like this for awhile.”

Coran shook his head, giving him a look of fond exasperation. “Never would have expected you to be this hopeless,” he said, but he was smiling as he turned his gaze back to his work.

And Shiro was grinning too as he gave their joined hands a light squeeze before settling in more comfortably for them both, watching the lamps of the archives float about the room, because this…  _this,_ he was pretty sure was what he had wanted.


	29. Rummage

“I confess, I still find it somewhat hard to believe.”

Shiro carried Thatchia into the kitchen to get them both some lunch and was mildly surprised to find Coran hunched over a set of datapads with their two resident Galra. “What’s up?” he asked as he opened one of the cooler chambers.

“Well, the good news is that one of our Detrichani cells has finally identified the ships that have been plaguing them. The  _strange_ news is the identification.”

“It’s Prince Lotor and his assistants,” Ylva supplied as she munched on some sort of fruit.

“Who’s that?”

“Zarkon’s  _son_ ,” Coran said with a heavily incredulous note coloring his voice. “If these two aren’t tweaking my ears.”

“Why would we make that up?” Ylva protested. “The guy was just as much a pain in our karkans as Old Scarface was when we were with Retro.”

“Ob _sessed_  about Altean and Yulnadae tech,” Aldri said, reaching over to steal a piece of her sister’s fruit slices. “Constantly up our noses for pure stuff.”

“And now he’s after the Detrichani?” Shiro asked, setting down a bowl of kepru crackers for Thatchia and a sandwich and bottle of Borakkhan Root Soda for himself. 

“Seems that way. For what reason other than their association with us, we’re not sure yet,” Coran muttered, tugging at his mustache. “But Yulnadae tech… We might be able to use that against him.”

“Are you thinking of something in the Old Paladin’s Lab?”

“Not quite. Something bigger.”

-

“ _Damn._ Who the hell would put a lab  _here?”_

“Which is exactly the reasoning for why she did it!” Coran said, leaning over Shiro’s shoulder as the Lions flew down towards the magma rivers and ash fields of Morla Prime, Smooshy clinging to Yellow’s back. “Can’t steal what you can’t reach, eh, old boy?”

Smooshy tweedled a response over the comm, then launched himself off Yellow, his short-flight rockets activating to let him glide over the hot ash and magma.

“What’s he doing?” Hunk asked.

“Smooshy’s going to guide us in since he can deactivate all the defenses as we go. Joitree was, ah,  _protective_ of her work.”

As if to prove his point, over a dozen three-point laser heads popped up out of the ash crust before Smooshy’s camera eye glowed and they powered back down.

“Geez, no kidding. What _else_ did she put up?” Pidge asked.

“Um. You… don’t really want to know. Just let Smooshy deal with it.”

The droid in question finally halted his journey over what still looked like nothing but another ash field, stumping his way towards a short outcropping. But Coran had signaled they land, so they had all set down the Lions and disembarked to follow.

“ _Dude,”_ Lance murmured, impressed, when a tiny  _wormhole-_ looking portal opened up in the rock. 

“Oh my  _God.”_ Pidge ran to run her fingers around the edge, trying to find the controls. “How does this  _work_?”

“It’s a standard Nonai-Hexa Waypoint Gate,” Coran said. “Albeit much smaller than normal. Yulnadae-designed of course, but they used to be much more common back in my day. Apparently the Galra were never able to replicate the tech.”

“So when they started failing from age, they just… _vanished?”_ Pidge asked, disappointed.

“Seems that way.”

“Might have been for the better,” Shiro said softly. “Can you imagine how much faster the Empire would have grown if they’d had more access to something like this the whole time?”

“Hm… A valid point. Well, shall we?”

-

Pidge and Hunk looked like they’d been dropped in a candy store, and Shiro quickly got out of the way as Pidge lunged for the closest container, only to be snagged by the collar by an irate Smooshy.

“He says stay put until he finishes booting up the lab,” Coran said, leaning on a console. “Wise advice, really. There could still be more defenses to disarm.”

“Were all Yulnadae this paranoid?” Keith asked, eyeing a series of claw-like crane arms suspiciously.

“I wouldn’t call it being paranoid so much as properly concerned. Even amongst each other, they were notoriously competitive, and that’s not getting into the likes of the Interro corps. Nasty, nasty pieces of work  _they_ we- ah, what is it?” Coran asked when Smooshy stumped back around the corner he’d previously vanished to, beeping in alarm.

“What’s he saying?” Hunk asked, cautiously edging away from a shelf he’d been peeking at in the droid’s absence.

“He says he’s found something urgent. Let’s go.”

The ‘Something Urgent’ turned out to be some sort of column of reddish-looking stone surrounded by active screens Shiro couldn’t read in the same pink light that had been in the Old Paladin’s Lab. 

“Oh, my, my, my. I never thought I’d see one of _those_ activated.”

“What  _is_ it?” Shiro asked.

“An Altura-Resin Preserve. It was a non-chilling alternative to cryo that a Yulnadae scientist was working on back when but he… well, he was caught up in the purge. To think someone-”  _ **TWEEP**_ _“-Elakka?_ That’s  _Elakka_ in there?”

Pidge got out of Smooshy’s way and went to try and peer over Coran’s arm as he began fiddling with the controls in a hurry. “Who’s Elakka?” she asked, ducking his attempt to brush her off. 

“She was Joitree’s… student. Apprentice. Family. It’s a bit hard to quantify now. I thought she’d been caught up in the purge too, but for her to be  _here-_  Smooshy  _wait-!”_

They all dove for cover as the droid produced rotary saws where its hands had been and stumped forward, beginning to slice into the stone with a frightening amount of ease. 

“Remind me never to piss  _him_ off,” Lance murmured quietly as they hid behind consoles to avoid flying razor-sharp chips of resin-rock.

“No kidding,” Shiro agreed.

“This is bad,” Coran fretted. “We don’t even know what her vitals are in there, or how to stabilize her. Surely he can’t just cut her out and be done with it!”

“Or maybe he can,” Keith said as he peeked over the shelf he’d taken shielding behind.

“ _What?”_

Cautiously, they all looked out from their hiding places to find Smooshy delicately lifting a small figure out of a chair, resin dust coating hair and clothing.

And it was breathing.

-

They all stood crowded around the lab table Smooshy had deposited his burden on. Coran had carefully cleaned her up and checked her vitals to make sure that she was at least baseline safe. “The only problem is that we don’t know exactly how her…ah, unorthodox removal will affect her waking,” he finally said once he’d finished.

“She’s so…  _tiny,”_  Pidge murmured.

“Yeah, you won’t be the shortest on the ship anymore-  _ow!”_

 _“Shut it,_ Lance.”

At the noise of the bickering, their object of study scrunched her nose with a small groan.

“Both of you shut up, she’s waking up,” Keith said, leaning over the supine form.

That proved to be a mistake, as once black eyes opened and focused on him, the petite alien let out an almost animal screech of rage and launched off the table with enough force to knock him flat. “ _ **Pimach!**  _How  _dare you_ steal her armor?!”

“Quiznak-!” Coran quickly rounded the table and grabbed the snarling Yulnadae just as her gloves began to make an ominous hissing noise, tucking her under his arm as she struggled wildly. “ _Elakka!_ He didn’t-  _He didn’t steal it!”_

Shiro grabbed Keith as he heaved himself to his feet and they both ducked behind Smooshy as he stumped over to assist with the melee. The other three had scattered to keep out of the way.

“Let go, Klaka!  _Put me down!”_

_“Not until you calm down and listen!”_

_**BEEP** _

The noise was enough that they all cringed, and the small alien with no helmet had to stop thrashing to clamp her hands over her ears.

“Augh. Thank you, Smooshy… I think. Now then,” Coran said as he set Elakka on a console, but kept a firm hand clamped on her shoulder in case she tried to fight him again. “What I was  _trying_ to say is that you have been asleep long enough that Red chose a new pilot. They  _all_ did.”

“They… what?” Elakka looked around, seeming to see the rest of them for the first time. Shiro saw her once again bristle when she saw Keith. But when her eyes landed on Pidge, they narrowed to tiny slits. 

Small clawed hands clenched in long skirts. “It seems I have a lot to catch up on.”

-

Pidge fidgeted as she looked over her shoulder at Coran and Elakka hissing at each other in an unintelligible language with occasional beeping interjections from Smooshy. “Man… did you guys see that  _look_  she gave me?”

“If Coran hadn’t cut in, she probably would have gone after you next. “ Lance looked at Shiro. “You and Hunk are the only ones that’ve been down in the creepy lab. What gives?”

Shiro sighed and scratched the back of his neck, setting his helmet down next to him. He was suddenly  _very_ glad for the lab’s air conditioning to hide his discomfort. “I guess it’s pretty obvious the last Red Paladin was her mentor… but the last Green Paladin kindasorta was, too. They were collaboration partners on a lot of work. That lab down in the lower levels where Smooshy came from was their joint place.”

“…Oh.” Pidge shuffled in her seat awkwardly and Keith hunched over even more. 

“This isn’t gonna be weird at all,” he muttered.

“ _Touch that and die!”_ Elakka snapped suddenly, making them all jump, and Keith jerked his hand back.

“I wasn’t touching anything!”

She continued to bare  _lethal-_ looking teeth at him in a vicious hiss until Smooshy bodily picked her up and followed Coran into another room.

“I wasn’t!”

“We believe you,” Shiro said, scrubbing his face with his flesh hand. “Depending on how short of a time it was between…  _things_ and her going into the rock, she’s probably going to be extremely irritable towards you and Pidge for awhile. Hunk, why don’t you go see if you can find out how much Coran’s got her caught up on?”

“Uh, those teeth of hers look  _really_ sharp.”

“Fine,  _I’ll_ go.”

Elakka was seated in Smooshy’s hands, her arms folded, and Coran was leaning against a shelf full of some kind of containers. “Ah, Shiro, good timing. I just finished the, ah, history lesson, as it were.”

Elakka looked him up and down, and he tried not to think about how those black eyes of her looked like voids. “Klaka tells me you’re wearing Joia and Mira’s work now.”

“Er- yeah. He took off the Galra-made arm and constructed a new one out of combining their prototypes.”

She bit her lip in a deep frown, then her ears lifted slightly. “They always did want to make an artificer out of you,” she muttered quietly, then took a deep breath and blew it out. 

“ _Fine_. What do you need?”


	30. Rounding Out

_Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep_

Entering the command center, Shiro found Coran frowning at the screens of the navigational console, fiddling with several control knobs. “What’s that noise?”

“That’s what _I’d_ like to know. The Castle’s picking up the signal, but damn if I can find anything that’s actually causing i-”

The door swished open again and Shiro found himself nearly bowled over by Ylva, who ended up practically seated on his shoulders, fur puffed and ears perked on edge. “What the  _he-_ ”

“ _Aldri says you heard the Wandering Ship!”_ she practically squealed, vaulting off Shiro with enough force that he had to grab the doorframe to keep from ending up meeting the floor with his face. “Lemmeseelemmesee _lemmesee!”_

“The who of what?” Coran asked, barely getting out of the way fast enough to avoid becoming her next perch.

“The Wandering Ship!” Clawed fingers flew over holo controls as others began meandering in, no doubt drawn by the beeline the Galra scientist had made up from Triad’s home lab. “Everyone in the whole Empire knows about it! Well, not you all, ‘cause you haven’t been here, but  _shekai,_ I never thought I’d be around when it made a pass!”

“Soooo… what  _is_ it?” Hunk asked, peering over her shoulder. 

“It’s a ghost ship, for lack of a better term,” Aldri said as she leaned an elbow on her over-excited sister’s head to keep her from vibrating through the console. “Anyone within the vicinity can hear its signal, and some have even claimed to see a translucent image, but no one’s ever been able to make contact, or catch it in any kind of tractor.”

“ _Weird_.”

“I  _do_ see something.”

They all turned their attention to the screen Allura was squinting at. At first, there seemed to be nothing but empty space and a few stars-

-then one of the stars vanished as a dark void passed in front of it.

Ylva made a barely audible squeaking noise as Coran gently nudged her aside to re-take the controls and zoom in on that area. Several tweaks and alterations later, a shape slowly began to emerge. A long green-grey, tube-like object with two little orbs and a spine at the point floated in time with the beeping signal, barely visible.

“That’s an Earth ship.”

Shiro blinked and looked over his shoulder at Lance and found him staring at the screen with a different sort of awe than Ylva had. “An Earth ship? Are you sure?”

“Am I  _sure? Look_ at it! I had to do a twenty-five-page essay on the early Soviet program as penalty in Space Flight History, I’d know an R-class when I see one!”

Pidge scrunched her nose, then went to pick up her spare datapad from her flight console. “But if that’s a _Soviet_ rocket, that means it’s been flying for over a hundred and fifty years!”

“Now that we know what it is, is there any way we can pinpoint  _why_ it’s there?” Allura asked. 

“Good question. But we’ve got three scientists and me and Hunk, so maybe we can come up with something.”

-

 _Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep_  

Coran had set the Castle on a course to follow the ghost ship for as long as it could while they sunk their efforts into solving the problem of where it actually _was_.

Pidge made a quietly annoyed growl and closed down a holowindow with more force than necessary before opening another one.

“Uh-” Shiro started to ask before Hunk shook his head.

“Trust me, you don’t want to get in the middle of it when the numbers aren’t lining up.”

Boy, that sounded familiar. Figuring it would be safer to go check on their resident Galra instead, he left Pidge to her calculations and went over to the extra consoles that had been set up by the navigation controls. “How goes?”

“This is actually really fascinating,” Aldri said as she lifted off the Yulnadae maitra-holo goggles that Elakka had connected to Triad. “The energy readings we’re picking up using Triad’s camera systems are in fact very similar to opening wormholes.”

“That’s… weird. Does it mean anything?”

“Well, there’s a possibility that-”

_**“Yes!”** _

Even Triad, floating in the air, jumped slightly before they all looked at Pidge. Oblivious to the surprise, she expanded the last holowindow she’d been working on in triumph. “Okay, so, Hunk and I fed all the information from Triad’s cameras through this formula, and I think we’ve got an answer. But first, what happens if a wormhole doesn’t open on both ends?”

Everyone looked at each other before Coran folded his arms and leaned back against the navigation console. “Well, logically, you’d crash into the end and it wouldn’t be very pretty.”

“ _Normally._ But what if, instead, you just stayed stuck inside it?”

“Interesting.” Coran tugged at his mustache in thought. “So you’re suggesting that the reason this ship has been a ‘ghost’, as it were, is because it’s been trapped in wormhole space all this time?”

“It _does_ match up with all the readings we’ve found,” Ylva agreed.

“So that answers the why,” Keith said. “But  _now_ we’ve got the question of can we  _reach_ it?”

“Well, if we plug Triad in to the navigation systems, we can lock on to its wormhole signal. That should allow us to punch through to it.”

“Whoa, whoa.” Hunk put aside his equipment and got up. “Opening a wormhole to get something that’s  _stuck_ in a wormhole? Won’t that risk  _us_ getting stuck?”

“I don’t think so. Here.” Aldri handed him the goggles so he could see what she’d been monitoring. “Basically, we’ll be  _completing_  the wormhole that pulled it in, so it’ll just… pop out with us.”

“I’m in!” Pidge said immediately.

Lance held up his hand. “Me, too!”

“It seems like a worthy scientific endeavor to rescue a ship the Galra couldn’t catch for over a hundred years,” Elakka agreed. “Present company excluded.”

“No offense taken, let’s go, let’s go, let’s  _go!”_ Ylva pressed eagerly.

“Sounds good to me,” Shiro said and Keith just nodded assent from his right.

“Well?” Allura asked Coran. “With Mother still sleeping, that seems like a decisive vote.”

“All right, then. Let’s go pick us up a ghost ship.”

-

 _Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep_  

“It really is just floating in here,” Allura said softly as they pushed through the wormhole. “Will it make it through before the end closes?”

“This is an unexpected problem,” Aldri said as she ‘watched’ through Triad’s eye via the goggles to try and keep the Castle even with the mystery ship. It was proving much more difficult than expected with the latter hardly seeming to move at all. “Does the Castle have any sort of tractor or tether we can use to make sure it follows us?”

“Naturally.” With several quick activation commands, Coran sent a large claw-like winch creeping from a panel just below the command center to grip the ship just below the rocket cone.

Now they just had to hope the tether didn’t snap during exiting.

“Thirty tics left… twenty… ten…”

The warping light of the wormhole gave way to the darkness of space, and when the camera revealed that the mystery ship floated below them, the room erupted.

—

 _Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep_  

The winch proved too unwieldy to guide the ship into the hanger, so the five of them donned their armor and helmets and jetted out to retrieve it.

“Man…” Lance murmured, running a hand over the metal panels. “An actual piece of Earth space history.  _Here.”_

“Do you know which one it is, rocket expert?” Shiro asked teasingly as he floated around the orbs at the nose.

“We can identify it once it’s on board,” Keith pointed out. “The less time we spend out here the better.”

Shiro saw Lance roll his eyes mightily, but Keith  _was_ right; the weird wormhole craft was better off in the hanger. Taking up their positions, they activated their jetpacks and began slowly pushing it towards the Castle.

The Lions had all moved themselves to make room for their strange new guest, and Smooshy and the hanger cranes took over most of the lifting once they’d made it past the airlocks. 

“Hey… do you hear that?”

“Hear what, Keith?”

“ _Listen_.”

Shiro tilted his head towards the globes at the nose of the craft, and-

_“Raf!”_

Surely he hadn’t heard right. And glancing at the others, they seemed to be experiencing similar disbelief. Cautious of getting too close to the ship, he edged around the nose and leaned in-

“ _Raf! Raf, raf! Rawrf!”_

“That’s a  _dog_ ,” Hunk said, almost like he still didn’t believe it. And then Lance shot up from where he’d gone to crouch by the other side of the orb, his eyes huge.

“Shit- Smooshy! Over here! We need you to open up this porthole side!”

As the big droid stumped over, they all went around to see what had Lance so bugged.

It  _was_ a dog.

An actual  _dog,_ ears perked, barking her little head off as she was lying in a contained flight harness and cabin.

“Oh my god,” Pidge said quietly. “We found a Soviet space dog.”

“We didn’t find  _a_ Soviet space dog,” Lance said. “We found  _the_ Soviet space dog. That’s  _Laika.”_

 _“Wh-”_ Pidge adjusted her glasses, squinting at the hound. “That  _can’t_ be Laika. Even the covered up documents admitted she  _died_ during her flight and the probe burned up-”

“And yet we just found her ship, stuck in a wormhole for a hundred whatever years.”

With a loud metallic  _pop,_ Smooshy finished unsealing the hatch and pulled it off, and now there was no mistaking the dog’s eager barking as she squirmed in her cabin harness. And yet, for almost a full minute, they could only  _stare._

 _“_ We’re keeping her.”

Keith pushed past Hunk and Pidge and, before anyone could protest, began unhooking the cabin harness. 

Blinking, Pidge recovered and started to grab for his arm. “Wait a minute! We don’t even know if that’s the  _actual_ Laika or some kind of alien copy, or-”

“Or what? She obviously needs water and out of that probe. We can figure out the rest later.”

Pidge looked at Shiro and made a motion of ‘are you kidding me?’ Shiro just shrugged. This wasn’t a side of Keith he’d seen before, but he wasn’t going to discourage it. “Won’t be the first weird pet we have on board,” he said.

“Ugh, fine. We have a century plus Soviet wormhole dog. Let’s go show the others.”

“ _Raf!”_


End file.
